Road crossings are built to keep us safe, but that doesn’t mean they are: they’re still the site of 7,000 pedestrian accidents in the UK, every year.

Their lights can tell drivers and pedestrians what should be happening - but they can’t see what is happening. And they definitely can’t adapt to it. From more cars and bikes on the road every year, more types of vehicles sharing space, and the “smartphone zombies” phenomenon, the chaos of crossings is becoming a life-and-death issue for everyone.

Rather than a campaign to make people smarter at crossings, Direct Line had the know-how to create a more radical solution. A “Smarter Crossing”, one that understood and managed the road in real-time. We would make sure it solved real problems. And most importantly, to start a real debate about the viable future of road safety, we’d build it for real.

We brought the crossing to life at Wimbledon Studios, on a typically dangerous street setting. Two cameras fed data back to a ‘vision algorithm’ which could determine the direction, speed, and identity of each entity on the crossing. This fed instructions to the two-lane, 22m long LED road surface, which allowed the road to:

• Change the shape and angle of its ‘default’ crossing as needed

• In an emergency, determine best course of action and update its markings in under 1/100 of a second

Most importantly, we made sure all these functions actually worked - so that when we invited the press to test it, they could cover the story knowing that it was no stunt, but a real demonstration of Direct Line’s expertise.

We followed this up with social spots that showed different ‘danger cases’, targeted to the different audiences that feared them most.

560 pieces of coverage were generated in total - 258 regional press, 17 national press, 173 broadcast. Our Crossing worked both as a tech story and a human one, getting exposure in everything from Wired to the Sun, and even TV coverage on BBC, for a total 582m impressions.

At launch, Ad Recall and Interest spiked, and organic search almost doubled, along with a 94% uplift in Brand Interest. As our social spots deepened the story, Ad Favourability shot up, hitting best-in-class level for the Finance sector.

But most importantly, the Smarter Crossing has shifted expectations of what the insurance Brand Experience should be, in a real way - the technology has received backing from road safety charity Brake and The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety and right now, we are in talks with 16 councils about how to bring the Smarter Crossing technology to their streets.