Shockingly Good Advertisements?

November 10, 2009 4 comments

As I was walking along Swanston Street this afternoon, a couple of advertisements caught my attention. Both came from the Worksafe Victoria, a government agency tasked to improve workplace health and safety in the state of Victoria. They were both very eye-catching and immediately got the message through.

Here’s the first from a tram stop shelter:

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And a second one on a tram which is quite unnerving to say the least. I saw a few heads turn to look at it as people boarded the tram:

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Graphically painful re-enactments seemed to be the order of the day for their television commercials too. The one below is targeted at reducing musculo-skeletal injuries at the workplace, which fortunately isn’t as gory or scary as the posters above, but probably just as painful.

The thing about all the advertisements above is that the message is very clear: Take care of your safety at work, or the consequences can be horrendous.

What do you think of these ads? Would they work elsewhere?

By Walter
Founder of Cooler Insights, I am a geek marketer with almost 24 years of senior management experience in marketing, public relations and strategic planning. Since becoming an entrepreneur 5 years ago, my team and I have helped 58 companies and over 2,200 trainees in digital marketing, focusing on content, social media and brand storytelling.

4 Comments

  1. The current AU govt is very pro-labour & workers unions. So this kinda direction is kinda expected. Still… quite gory.

  2. Your post reminds me of the time when I was working in NPB back in the Cuppage Centre days. We used to have an OSH Div which was later transferred to MOL. We had a collection of very scary safety videos which were showed in the safety training classes. I heard one time, one female trainiee fainted from watching one video.

    I think these videos were very helpful. Not sure if MOM still show them to the foreign workers. Probably not judging by the spate of industrial accidents lately.

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