The West Midlands Casualty Reduction Scheme (WMCRS)set itself the challenging task of persuading drivers not to use their mobile phones whilst driving, through educating these drivers of the consequences and dangers of their actions. Radio was the sole vehicle for this localised campaign as it offered a good match to the WMCRS operational area and offered unrivalled reach of the in car audience. In addition, the creative power of radio allowed WMCRS to convey its message in a memorable way - resulting in numerous creative awards (including Mobius and New York Festivals).

Promote awareness and change peoples minds about a difficult social problem.

The campaign ran as spot airtime messages across Heart FM and Galaxy FM in the West midlands area to a combined audience of around 1.2 million listeners. The hard-hitting radio spots feature a driver accepting a phone call whilst in his car from the grim reaper, aka "death". Death predicts an accident that the driver will soon have as a result of being on the phone.

The campaign was very highly rated by listeners and had a 48% prompted recall (the highest recall of the year), but more importantly it also demonstrated that it could change peoples minds about this difficult social problem. Perhaps the best measure of the campaign's effectiveness was that, when asked to agree with the statement "The campaign would make me not use my mobile phone when driving", the percentage of people with agreed with this rose for 27% in 2008 to 47% in 2009.

"West midlands Casualty Reduction Scheme is committed to using education as an integral part of casualty reduction and protecting our communities from harm. To run this campaign as a 'radio only' campaign carried a measure of risk, however the innovative, creative design produced by Heart and Galaxy proved an outstanding success - 'Death Calling' was a truly memorable and impactful commercial. The evaluation ultimately provided the evidence to show that it was much stronger in motivating drivers to change their behaviour in comparison to previous campaigns" Lisa Newmarsh