The traffic in Brazil is considered one of the most violent in the Americas. Every hour, two people die in alcohol-related traffic accidents. And during Carnival, the numbers grow even higher. Despite of it, people keep drinking and driving. BrewDog, a Scottish beer brand recognized worldwide by its subversive marketing, wanted to alert drivers in a innovative and unorthodox way, raising awareness for the risks of drunk driving.

First of all, we knew that to really create an impact on drivers, they had to be hit by our message while driving. So we had the idea to use WAZE – the world's largest traffic app, with over 60 million users in Brazil – but without asking them for permission. How? Simply by using the accident alert tool, which allows any user to report an accident in real time. We report past accidents caused by drunk drivers in real time in the app, in the same place they happened in the past, but as if they just had happened. For the first time ever, the Waze’s accident alert became media, showing the image and news related to the accident, with a blunt message: "Don’t let it happen again. Don’t drink and drive.”

We wanted to turn the act of driving drunk into a powerful, real-time ad. For that we combined the target, the GPS location and the message/content into one experience.

So we mapped previous crashes linked to alcohol and chose 50 of them that happened close to the areas with many bars and festivities. We run the alerts during Sao Paulo's Carnival, a time when drunk driving numbers spike.

Our action was simply to simultaneously report those accidents on Waze’s platform and, due to the atypical number of these reports, call users’ attention.

By hacking an app commonly used to drunk drivers to avoid police roadblocks and escape of doing breathalyser we raised awareness to our message and sent an impacting message of social responsibility in a very fresh and innovative way: "Don’t let it happen again. Don’t drink and drive.”

And most of all: while they’re driving.

To create the alerts, the first step was turn the news about the past accidents into posters to be photographed and posted along with the message alerts in real-time.

But to report the past crashes alerts at Waze in real-time we had to be there in all of the 50 chosen locations.

So we gathered a team with different Waze accounts that during the 15 days of Carnival stayed at the exact locations where the past accidents happened.

We reported the accidents 3 times a day because Waze’s alerts last only for a couple of hours.

BrewDog became the first brand ever to turn the Waze’s accident alert into media.

With zero cost and zero investment we impacted over 4.2 million cars and had more than 100K real-time interactions on the reports.

We turned the act of driving drunk into a powerful, real-time ad. It combined the target, the GPS location and the message/content into one experience.