Accidents and deaths among young people on Melbourne’s Metro train system had been on the rise for years. Our brief was to get the idea of train safety on the agenda for an audience of under 25-year-olds, and reduce the amount of accidents on the system by 10%.

The problem is, young people don’t listen to public safety messages. At best they ignore them. At worst, they act against them.

Our strategy was to avoid traditional PSA advertising techniques and directly target young people through branded content: embedding our safety message into the things our audience seeks out and shares.

Dumb Ways to Die was an integrated direct campaign that used entertaining content to reposition being unsafe around trains as the dumbest way to die. We didn’t preach, we didn’t threaten, and we didn’t lecture.

Branded content was designed to raise awareness of train safety and get it on the agenda. But every element of the campaign directed people to pledge to be safe around trains: we wanted to get users of Melbourne’s Metro system to actively invest in changing their behavior.

With no media budget, the music video received over 20 million YouTube views within a week. The song charted on iTunes in 28 countries, and made the top 10 in several. Over 3 million facebook shares made it the most shared PSA in history.

The website is nearing its millionth pledge to be safe. In post-testing, 39% of our core audience said they would act safer around trains because of the campaign. For the three months post-launch (the most recent data), Metro experienced a 21% reduction in accidents and deaths in key accident areas compared to the same time last year.

Dumb Ways to Die used a radical approach to public safety messaging. By using entertainment rather than shock tactics, we were able to engage a young audience wired to resist lectures and warnings from authorities.

And given the importance of peer-to-peer recommendations in behavioural change, this approach meant that young people would actively share the safety message amongst themselves, rather than simply mocking it as they would usually do.