Transport Systems Centre

The impacts of television advertising on road trauma have been debated in South Australia and elsewhere since the early 1990s. Claims that high intensities of television advertising are very effective, and necessary, and that reductions in numbers of serious casualty crashes are immediate, are provocative when set against the general understanding of how television advertising works. In 1996 the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) recommended to the SA Government that it should increase funding for road safety, in particular television advertising (Vulcan, Cameron, Mullan and Dyte, 1996). These recommendations were based on research outcomes that underpinned the following assumptions: • advertising has an effect on road safety outcomes that is statistically independent of levels of enforcement; • very high levels of television advertising are justifiable; • there will be an immediate response to advertising. Rather than immediately follow the advice of Vulcan et al (1996), with the corresponding large increases in expenditure, South Australian authorities decided to test these assumption