Road safety ad's - RSA v's TAC (Oz)

Any advertisement campaign, whether graphic or not, has very little long term effect on people's behaviour. The ads might improve people's attitude and intentional changes - i.e. if you ask someone immediately after they will say "I won't do that again, look what can happen" but their existing behaviour is unlikely to change in the long term in the absence of other pressures.

In fact what evidence there is (for health advertising in general) suggests negative fear based messages are less persuasive than positive persuasive messages. There is a lot of contention with the graphic ads as to whether they function more to set an agenda (for road safety in general) than directly trying to persuade people to change their behaviour.

The most effective intervention remains visible enforcement, with advertising campaigns built to support it. Cutting enforcement and thinking that increasing ad time will balance it out is not going to work as well.