Every year thousands of young people die behind the wheel due to texting. The campaign’s objective was to change that behavior. But how do you convince young people not to text while driving?

Young people don’t like being told what they should or shouldn’t do. Therefore we decided to do the opposite: oblige them to text while driving. Young aspirant drivers were told they would have to pass the mobile phone test behind the wheel before obtaining their driver’s license. Everything was filmed with candid cameras and put into a webvideo. The video shows how the young drivers reacted before, during and after taking the texting test. The film was sent to important influencers, journalists and bloggers.

RYD’s network of young volunteers was encouraged to spread text messages containing a link to the film. Since the campaign has only kicked-off the 28th of April it’s hard to deliver car-crash statistics at this moment. But after two weeks, the YouTube video had been watched 1.3 million times. Of which 141,456 on a mobile device.

These YouTube statistics don’t include the views on hundreds of blogs who reposted the video themselves. We were picked up by national TV (Belgium) and international TV (France, Canada, UK, US). Several news sites (BBC, TF1, RTL, Daily Mail) and major blogs (Mashable, Buzzfeed, Break.com…) reported about us. Just google “the impossible texting & driving test” to get an idea of the huge coverage. The first week we we’re ranked 3rd in the FR viral video chart of most shared videos. With 8.605 shares we’re now still ranked 12th in the last 30 days. Next to that RYD is asked to show the video to kids in schools, and it proves to be very effective. It speaks the language of our audience. There are no crashes in the video. No blood. Instead we let people realize the danger by