Convincing people to think, act or behave differently is incredibly hard work. Even more so when the decision-making mental arithmetic that takes place at lightning speed is answering the equation: ‘If I do this thing right now I will have a whole lot of fun. What’s there to lose?’ Yet, sometimes the cost of a few moments of fun can be life-changing. In the public sphere, when it comes to behaviour change, it’s often an advertiser or content marketer’s role to get inside the mind of a brand’s audience. 

Here, Clemenger BBDO chief strategy and experience officer Simon Wassef and behavioural scientist Helena Duniec share their approach to crafting insight and science-driven creative campaigns that genuinely change behaviours. 

Creating genuine, lasting behaviour change through marketing communications is really, really hard. Why? Because humans are impulsive and irrational. Those reflexes are wired deeply in our hearts and minds, entwined with our cultural norms and like a complex piece of software with lines and lines of code making it all work. That’s why we like what we like and do what we do, over and over, until something forces us to change. 

The thing about advertising is that a lot of it doesn’t work at that level. It is incredibly difficult to change our cultural source code and rewire those connections buried deep in our psychology. As an industry, we have become effective at getting people to notice our brands,  creating emotional connections or mental availability via repeatable, distinctive brand assets, driving consideration and creating future demand. But getting people to fundamentally change how they behave, especially in more complex spaces like public policy or health, and in a world of fragmenting media and shrinking budgets, is especially tough. The repetition, reinforcement and incentives required to get people to do (or not do) things over time are simply harder to do. 

Herein lies our opportunity as practitioners. The power of the big idea – a thought that can cut through not only the brand landscape but to media personalities and journalists, private and public sector stakeholders and our elected representatives – is at an all-time high. When we have to capture audiences from TikTok to Sky News, it is big ideas, underpinned by behavioural science that can change the game, now and for the long term. 

At Clemenger, our approach is grounded in both science and art. Drawing inspiration from Geert Hofstede and Dr Marcus Collins, and using a bedrock of behavioural science, we supercharge the power of creativity as a force for change. When we do that, we make work people can’t help but talk about – a self-propelling system of influence. Work that compels us to reframe norms, challenge accepted beliefs and create culture change at scale. 

The situation

Clemenger has worked with the Victorian government’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) for more than a decade, applying our method to issues from drink driving and fatigue to speeding and country road safety, changing Victorian behaviour for the better with big, enduring ideas.

But sometimes a new technology comes along that creates an entirely new set of behaviours or risk-taking, like texting while driving, that requires an entirely novel solution. In 2024, it was e-scooters. 

E-scooters are having a major moment, and it’s no wonder – convenient, fun and fast, there’s a lot to love about them. The Victorian community embraced the public share scheme with open arms, recording a whopping 8.5 million trips in the two-year trial and making it one of the most popular of its kind in the world.

In 2024, new legislation was passed in Victoria to make e-scooter share schemes a permanent fixture. But as e-scooters become more prevalent, so does the risk of injury and hazardous riding behaviour. When used inappropriately or unsafely, e-scooters present a risk not only to riders themselves, but also to other road users including vulnerable pedestrians. 

This new, harmful reality was already taking hold in the community. E-scooter-related hospitalisations had more than doubled in recent months and we needed to do something different to shift behaviour at scale.

The job to be done

How do you take something convenient, fun and fast and put a layer of responsibility around it without being seen as fun police? That was the tension we had to resolve. We had to reframe e-scooters to deter risky riding behaviour, improving the safety of both riders and the community at large. 

We also had to do it without being laughed out of the room by a typically younger cohort who think they’re invincible. 

The job was not to deter people from using e-scooters. We wanted Victorians to use them – they are beneficial for reducing urban traffic and parking congestion, cost-effective and encourage people to visit parts of their cities or neighbourhoods they might otherwise forego. 

We needed to create a way for Victorians to understand that e-scooters – capable of speeds of up to 40km/h – carried with them a risk and that the rules had to be taken seriously. 

The audience

Not unlike many risk-taking behaviours, young people aged 16-34 – and young males in particular – are the most prone to dangerous e-scooter riding and rule-breaking behaviour.

Best practice behaviour change campaigns must tap into the audience’s mindset to effectively reach them. From the outset, we knew we had to design creative that was attention-grabbing, unpredictable and resonant with this younger cohort, and that meant starting with an understanding of what was happening inside their brains. 

Spoiler alert: what’s happening inside their brains is they think they’re immortal. Add to that a layer of social sharing baked into the majority of things they do (whether it’s for Instagram, TikTok or the group chat), and we are faced with an audience even more cavalier than previous generations.

Cognitive biases shaping mindsets

In academic terms, risky e-scooter riding is underpinned by several cognitive biases, including over-confidence bias, optimism bias and hyperbolic discounting.  

Put simply, this means many riders are overconfident in their abilities, feel they are invulnerable to negative consequences and place greater value on immediate rewards (fun, fast and convenient mode of transport) over long-term outcomes (safety of myself and others).

The problem

E-scooter riders have an instant gratification mindset. Many young riders know the rules but see them as getting in the way of their immediate riding experience, so they treat them as ‘suggestive’ rather than ‘mandatory’.

The key dangerous riding behaviours – drink riding, not wearing a helmet, footpath riding and carrying a passenger – are all split-second decisions where the power of ‘now’ outweighs the rational or rule-following part of our brains. Or where applying the rules to the letter would essentially ‘defeat the purpose’ of choosing the e-scooter in the first place. ‘You mean I can’t get from the pub to the train station on this thing? What’s the point?’  

To make matters worse, e-scooters are not taken as seriously as other modes of transport, despite the fact riders are more vulnerable and unprotected than other road users. Think about it. It’s a scooter. It looks exactly like the ones kids ride from a young age, only larger.  

Speaking their language

We had to get to the heart of how the audience was talking about e-scooters in their own language, on their own terms. We knew from experience marketing to younger audiences that classic approaches (for example, in language and execution) would, at best, be dismissed and, at worst, mocked. So we conducted social listening on platforms like Reddit and TikTok to understand the cultural conversation around e-scooters and be able to create a more authentic engagement with our audience.

The insight

Our listening revealed a key piece of language. The online chat described e-scooters as a fun new ‘toy’. And because it’s a toy, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. They underestimate the serious risk of injury they pose to themselves and other road users. 

The added layer of jeopardy on top of this toy conversation is the context of when our audience played with them. They cruise around the streets away from the eyes of authority, on the way home from the pub, possibly under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or under the influence of friends who encourage increased risk-taking. While e-scooters were seen as toys, they could potentially turn into out-of-control toys, like a cricket ball flying into a window (or a face), an erratic remote-controlled car, or a slip-and-slide with too much soapy water on it.

Creative challenge

With our insight crystallised, we would need to develop a campaign that got e-scooter riders (young males in particular) to take safety seriously by reframing e-scooters as serious motor vehicles with serious consequences – including the risk of personal injury, threats to others and increased penalties.

Finding a new logic to cut through

When it comes to e-scooters, parent-to-child finger-wagging or traditional scare tactics wouldn’t cut it with our young male target audience. We had to find new ways to connect to combat a sense of apathy and predictability around public safety messaging. 

Our approach was not to take the language of toys head-on but to engage our audience in a way that would disarm and force reappraisal rather than talk down to them. Our big idea was articulated as: ‘If you think e-scooters are a toy, think again’. 

This approach opened the opportunity to turn to the semiotics of traditional toy advertisements to create a surprising twist in their toy logic – jolting them out of their false sense of security. We had to ramp up the jeopardy to disprove rider logic at scale in a personal, emotive and distinctive way. 

By using the jarring transition between the ‘toy world’ where dangerous riding behaviour takes place and the ‘real world’ consequences of personal injury or harm to other road users, we were able to tap into loss aversion in a fresh way. This created a circuit breaker to snap riders out of their automatic, instant gratification mindset and into a more intentional understanding of the bigger picture consequences of risky riding behaviour.

For the TAC, famed for its devastating, at times gruesome, real-world advertising, this created a distinctiveness bias. No one was used to seeing toy-like animation and stop-motion coming from the TAC. It was a literal show-stopper when the campaign debuted. Meanwhile, deploying other tropes from the world of toy advertising – catchy jingles and hyperbolic sound effects – created a bait-and-switch effect, aiding emotional priming to heighten unpredictability and make people double-take, impacting memorability and retention. 

Conclusion

The story of our e-scooter campaign is one of rewiring the cultural software that influenced young Victorians’ behaviour. Listening to our audience and then flipping the script with the behaviour change tools at our disposal, enabled us to create a campaign and platform that has now seamlessly entered the cultural conversation.