Be honest.

Have you ever been a distracted driver?
Peep your tweets while driving?
Touch up the makeup after pulling up to a red light?
Text?

If your answer’s yes, we’ve got some choice words for you in the form of some tragically compelling statistics, and an all-new creative campaign for the Florida Department of Transportation.

The truth of the matter is that 30% of Americans drive while distracted, and that 90% of them admit to using their smartphone while driving.

That kind of behavior can spell danger for pedestrians, bicyclists, other drivers, and themselves. In fact, from 2015 through 2019 there were a total of 3,396 pedestrian fatalities in the State of Florida alone. That’s a staggering statistic, and one of the utmost importance to the Florida Department of Transportation, who approached us this past year to help them tackle the problem.

The ask: create a campaign that educates Floridians of the dangers associated with driving while distracted, especially at the risk of pedestrians and bicyclists. More importantly, we needed to do it in a way that didn’t feel like another trite, boring, finger-wagging PSA.

So our creative and strategy teams took some time in the lab and realized that driverless cars could be the solution to this challenge. And no, we don’t mean the Tesla kind.

See, when you’re a distracted driver, your attention is split. Some combination of your eyes, hands, and mind aren’t focused on the act of driving, which leaves your car without a driver. We got it in our heads to show that distracted drivers are barely there by literally having them disappear behind the wheel.

That’s where our production team came in. We poured our resources into what would appear in frame during our commercial: our “disappearing drivers” and their surroundings.

We brought in a team of professional makeup artists to camouflage our actors into their cars. With the help of Vū Studio’s state-of-the-art digital production stage, our make-up artists were able to meticulously craft our optical illusion using only practical effects.

2 shooting days. 6 Make Up Artists. 4 Actors. 4 Cars. And one 300ft screen later…we think the work speaks for itself.