In an attempt to rid the country’s roads of a very old – and potentially very lethal – scourge, Highways England introduced a decades-old video game character into an altogether unfamiliar media context to remarkably successful effect.
Highways England is a government-owned company charged with operating and improving the nation’s motorways and major roads. Its key imperative is safety on the network: the organisation has been set the challenging KPI of reducing the number of people killed and seriously injured on the roads by 40% by 2020.
It had run a series of advertising campaigns encouraging vehicle owners to carry...