Belted Survivors

Advertising campaign for Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.

Role: Producer, Casting, PR

Recognition: Grand Axis, D&AD, Effie Awards, Best Awards, AdStars, Clio Awards, Poster House New York, Lürzer's Archive front cover

Turning the wounds left behind by seatbelts into badges of honour.

Live hard. Crash harder. Staunch young males make up the majority of New Zealand’s unrestrained crash fatalities. They reckon seatbelts are for kids, the elderly, the weak.  

To change their minds, seatbelts needed a tough new image.  

Real crash survivors proudly wore their seatbelt wounds as badges of honour, turning the visceral signs of a crash into powerful symbols of survival. And proving there’s nothing soft about a seatbelt.  

The boys’ pics hit eyes and feeds everywhere. Knowing these guys lean into gnarly shit, the survivors displayed their graphic marks of survival where they’d hit our audience hardest: outside pubs; through VICE; on their own feeds. Their ten stories recruited hundreds more, inspiring Belted Survivors everywhere to share images of their own seatbelt marks – and challenging their mates to make the right call too.