During Ramadan, people in the UAE take part in a daily fast, abstaining from food and water from sunrise to sunset, but they still have to drive. Compounded by intense desert heat, people are hungry, dehydrated and tired – which causes road rage and leads to a rise in traffic accidents.

As a brand dedicated to road safety, Chevrolet wanted to help. But without the budget for a major campaign, we didn’t simply want to add to the noise of easily ignored road safety messages, that litter the airwaves.

So instead of producing radio ads and simply focusing on achieving the widest reach, we honed our efforts on driving the greatest impact.

Our objectives:

• Create a meaningful & measurable impact on Ramadan road safety with a limited budget

• Don’t just change attitudes, but directly affect behavior and improve safety on the roads

To create meaningful change, we focused on the moments when we could have the biggest impact – when traffic was at its worst.

A simple insight from a study in the Journal of Ergonomics guided our approach: Soothing music can be an effective tool in reducing aggressive driving behavior.**

So we partnered with UAE radio stations and reorganized their playlists by Beats Per Minute (BPM). Then, when traffic was bad and people were most vulnerable to road rage, we played lower-tempo tracks to keep drivers calm.

By creating a proprietary software application, we were able to analyze road conditions in real-time and adjust the radio stations' playlists dynamically. So when traffic was normal, the music would be normal. But as traffic got worse, our software would activate and play music with a lower, more relaxing BPM - helping people to stay calm avoid unnecessary accidents.

We knew the effectiveness of our radio campaign wasn’t dependent on the audience, the time of day, or conventional radio metrics – it was dependent on the traffic affecting the mood of the drivers.

That’s why our creative was determined by the live data itself. Only when our software analyzed the road data in real-time and determined that traffic was bad, would our sponsorship activate.

We analyzed the playlists of three different radio stations and re-organized them according to the BPM of the songs. When the data showed live traffic was getting and the radio stations were notified, they could simply switch to the low-BPM category on their playlist - helping to keep drivers calm on the road.

Knowing that the fasting population was not just Emirati, but also included expats from Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries, we partnered with radio stations playing both Arabic and English music - enabling us to reach a wide audience of fasting drivers.

Using HERE Technologies’ mapping API, we created software that could identify, isolate and analyze data across selected major roadways and traffic zones in the UAE each day during Ramadan.

The software we developed would take this data and categorize the traffic density and assign it one of four road rage rankings. This is how we were able to know when our anti-road rage playlists were most needed. The same software was used to analyze and categorize the songs on each radio station’s playlists according to tempo - pairing the worst traffic with the most soothing tracks on each playlist.

If troublesome traffic was identified, our sponsorship would be triggered on each station and music with a lower BPM played. Our campaign was active across the UAE for the entire month of Ramadan, impacting the music on three major radio stations playing both Arabic and English music.

Dynamically running our sponsorship only during peak traffic times, we managed to affect significant change on a shoestring budget.

In the first two weeks of Ramadan alone:

• Accidents dropped by 29%, from 157 in 2017 to 111 in 2018 ***

• Road injuries fell by 43%, from 237 in 2017 to 136 in 2018 ***

• Road deaths decreased by 38%, from 26 in 2017 to 16 in 2018 ***