Overview

The USDOT Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is charged with overseeing the nation’s Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) industry and advancing its role in roadway safety. CMVs are a key contributor to the nation’s economic vitality, moving vast quantities of goods and passengers across America’s highways. FMCSA both partners with and regulates the CMV industry, communicating vital policy, regulatory, and educational information to a wide variety of stakeholders.

FMCSA’s key goal under the National Roadway Safety Strategy is to reach zero roadway fatalities involving large trucks or buses, and to combat the 5,000-6,000 such crashes each year.

Challenge

The sheer size and weight of CMVs increases their risks of serious crashes if they are not designed, maintained, and operated safely. And because they share the road with passenger vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians, these audiences should be aware of the unique safety concerns surrounding CMVs: that their height and length cause extended blind spots for drivers and wide turns, and that their weight requires more time to stop.

Strategy

FMCSA needed a multi-faceted approach to reach as many road users as possible to create ubiquitous understanding about the importance of safe driving around large vehicles. CMV drivers, passenger vehicle drivers, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians need to see themselves, through messaging and creative, as having a role in CMV crash prevention and feel buy-in for roadway safety.

Solution

Through serving as Prime for three blanket purchase agreements and multiple call orders, Yes&, along with partner Stratacomm, has launched national campaigns and managed other communications support to amplify FMCSA’s messaging about CMV safety. Highlights of recent call orders performed between 2021-2024 include:

1. Our Roads, Our Safety® is FMCSA’s flagship national public safety campaign designed to educate the public about the unique operating characteristics of large trucks and buses. Through this increased awareness, the campaign aims to change people’s behavior around CMVs, whether driving, riding, biking, or walking around them. We launched the campaign in 2016 and it continues today with fresh creative for impactful messaging and design. While a nationwide effort, the campaign places special emphasis on “opportunity” states with the most crashes and fatalities involving trucks and buses. We have supported the growth of the campaign to include more than 30 external industry organizations to amplify FMCSA’s campaign messages and materials, maintained FMCSA’s Drupal website to post toolkit materials and updates, and designed with a priority of Section 508 accessibility and diversity in all materials.

2. Stakeholder Engagement is a broad effort that encompasses multiple FMCSA priorities, both internal and external, as well as collaboration with field offices and sister modes like NHTSA as applicable. It includes support for key programs like the Work Zone Safety Campaign to reduce crashes in these target areas; the Safe Speeds and Distracted Driving Campaigns targeted to CMV drivers with compelling materials and reminders on these critical issues; promoting FMCSA’s Safe Driver Apprenticeship Pilot Program to trucking companies and prospective apprentice drivers ages 18-20; conferences and events; establishing the first-annual FMCSA Our Roads, Our Safety® Week observance; and outreach and materials for K-12 students to educate them about road safety from a young age.

3. The CMV Seat Belt “Y I Buckle Up” campaign was launched in response to a 2016 FMCSA study finding that 14% of drivers were not consistently wearing seat belts. To motivate behavior change, we began with conducting audience research through asynchronous Online Bulletin Boards with CMV drivers, allowing us to glean more in-depth responses than traditional focus group meetings. With this information, we created a campaign that showcased drivers’ main reasons for choosing to wear a seat belt, and that the risk of not wearing one outweighs the inconvenience of it.

4. The FMCSA Strategic Communications Plan call order aims to take a high-level view of Agency communications; research and analyze strengths, opportunities, achievements, and risks; and create a framework for five years of communications planning. The plan includes prioritization, umbrella messaging, how-to guides for challenges such as crisis communications, and guidance for best practices in everything from communications processes to website design and content to social media.  

Result

Main KPIs for our awareness campaigns focus primarily on impressions, and secondarily on clicks to the campaign website to learn more and download materials.

From a two-year segment of the annual Our Roads, Our Safety® campaign in 2022-2023: 

• Paid media achieved an overall estimated reach of more than 386 million total impressions, gaining efficiencies and improvements year over year.  

• Of that total, a focus on audio advertising delivered about 200 million impressions, and out-of-home advertising tactics like gas station TVs and billboards delivered over 96.3 million impressions.  

• Digital advertising drove more than 745,000 clicks to the campaign website.

Highlights from Stakeholder Engagement projects from 2022-2023 include: 

• The Work Zone Safety Campaign from 2022-2023 drew 209 million total impressions across social media advertising, digital display, radio/audio, and out-of-home; 259,000 website views; and leveraged learnings to retarget our audience through display ads with a .9% Click-Through Rate, surpassing the industry benchmark of .2%. 

• The Safe Speeds campaign ran for its first flight in 2023, driving 40 million impressions across social and radio/audio, with 66,000 clicks and 21,000 website users. 

• The Distracted Driving campaign also ran for its first modest flight on social media in 2023, driving 2 million impressions, 30,000 clicks, and 16,000 website users.

The CMV Seat Belt campaign ran from 2022-2023, driving: 

• Over 176 million estimated impressions and generating 104,527 clicks across all paid, earned, and owned tactics, with a paid media budget of $412,500.  

• Radio and audio were the leading drivers of impressions, reaching an estimated 77.6 million.  

• Display ads were the top traffic driver to our new campaign landing page with downloadable toolkit items, which saw over 94,000 page views.

We reimburse media companies on time which resulted in greater discounts on future buys. We were able to agree to terms that yielded ranges of 3-7% discount. 

Conclusion

This work demonstrates our ability to leverage a modest media budget to achieve significant impact in areas of crash causation, through a combination of efficient paid campaigns and the strength of continued partnerships to maximize reach. Through many years of supporting FMCSA, our team has gained a deep understanding of how to distill complex transportation information into compelling and easy-to understand messages, how to segment and target specific audiences with tailored communications, and the psychology and motivators of behavior change. 

Feedback

“You do a great job in giving us options, trying to keep us not stale, as can be the nature of government work. We've been pleased that you've taken our feedback throughout the years, and tried new things.” - Shashunga Clayton, FMCSA 

Awards

• American Advertising Awards DC, Silver ADDY, Our Roads, Our Safety® Public Service Campaign Video, 2023  

• Hermes Creative Awards, Platinum, “Our Plan” Video PSAs, 2022 

• Hermes Creative Awards, Gold, “Our Plan” Social Marketing Campaign, 2022 

• Hermes Creative Awards, Honorable Mention, “Let’s Roll!” Road Safety Animated Educational Game for Children, 2022