Click it or Ticket (NCDOT)
Full Campaign Refresh + Launch
Year:
2025
My Role:
Creative Director
Categories:
Branding, Photo, Video, Digital, Print
In 2025, my team and I dove headfirst into the challenge of breathing new life into the legendary “Click it or Ticket” campaign for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. For three decades, NCDOT’s iconic seatbelt awareness push had not only sparked matching initiatives in every single U.S. state, but also shaped the very language of federal seatbelt safety policy. That powerful legacy gave us an extraordinary launching pad, yet it also meant we had to break through 30 years of ingrained expectations. That’s when our squad of visionary copywriters and creatives joined forces, ready to reimagine the campaign for a new era.
1. Research + Ideation
The Click it or Ticket campaign has always had a single mission: save lives by getting people to buckle up. We sifted through decades of reports and surveys searching for the spark to write our next chapter. The answer revealed itself in one simple, repeated confession from 87% of cited drivers: “I forgot.” No overarching hatred of safety, no resistance to buckling up, just a moment’s lapse. That insight inspired us to reach for a 120-year-old advertising trick: the earworm. And so, “Sound of Safety” was born. It’s a campaign built on the power of memory and a single, overlooked truth. When we told the client our intention to produce a music track to act as the hinge of the campaign, they told us it had been years since they saw something that was not only inspiring but was based on actual research and insights. They summed up their response to the pitch in one word. “YES!”
2. Campaign Production
With the client on board and focus group testing of the idea a resounding success, we moved into our production of assets. To minimize our time-to-market, we began with static asset production while the planning for video and audio ran on a parallel path. For our print and digital executions where audio couldn’t accompany the ads, we decided to depart from the conventional seatbelt visuals and go with a more eye-catching set of visuals. To evoke the idea of our sound without the accompanying audio, we took our production to a local vinyl store and focused on our subjects interacting with the “Sound of Safety.”
With our static assets in the market, we pushed ahead with the completion of our headlining video and audio assets. We contracted a sound production studio to compose our track, and FWV's incredible video production team set about capturing our video assets. Over a 3-day shoot, we filmed 30 vehicles and talent to compose a shot library that could accompany our final video. The primary 30-second ad is below, but the footage we gathered that day fed over 40 variations of the ad for A/B testing, audience targeting, and location-specific placements.
3. Results
Overall, the "Sound of Safety" campaign is a prime example of what happens when a powerful insight drives your campaign creative. The efforts of our team drove a 7% increase in recall, with approximately 40 million impressions within the first month of the campaign launch. Doing the math, that means an extra 3 million people remembered that they should buckle up thanks to the "Sound of Safety."
