The Challenge
NYC DOT needed New Yorkers to internalize one idea across two full years: speeding ruins lives, and crashes cannot be undone. The core audience was young male drivers, the group most likely to speed and least likely to sit still for a safety message, with their families as a secondary target and, by 2025, moped riders as a fast-growing new one. Every season had to reach all five boroughs in a city that speaks dozens of languages, and every season had to outperform the one before it.
The Approach
We built the program on Ethnic Community Media and grew an omni-channel system around it, tuning the mix each flight based on what the last one taught us. Print, radio, and television ran through trusted community publications and stations in as many as 12 languages, while digital evolved from ECM websites to YouTube, then to gaming consoles, YouTube Shorts, and Spotify as we followed young drivers into channels competitors had not bought into. OOH moved from static formats to programmatic screens and high-visibility bus tails that reached low-inventory areas like Staten Island and the Cross Bronx. Sports became the emotional centerpiece, scaling from minor league ballparks and ceremonial first pitches to full-season partnerships with the Knicks, Rangers, and Nets, complete with on-court activations, game ball deliveries, and fan tabling.
The Results
Across multiple campaigns, Vision Zero delivered significant impressions and consistent growth. Season-over-season, each flight compounded its impact: spring campaigns, fall campaigns, and spring campaigns each built on the previous reach, with the Vision Zero Rewind campaign reaching unprecedented audiences even within budget constraints. Bus tails alone produced substantial impressions in a single flight, sports partnerships put the message in front of thousands of in-stadium fans across multiple seasons, and multilingual testing turned language from a checkbox into a performance lever, with Korean, Arabic, and Spanish creative each outperforming in the segments that mattered most.
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