Arrive Alive, one of Canada’s largest anti-impaired driving organizations, wanted to grab people’s attention on the most dangerous drinking night of the year: St. Patrick’s Day.

The goal was to spread awareness of this issue in order to prevent people from getting behind the wheel intoxicated. The team knew it was going to be important to speak to people directly, the very moment they ordered their first drink. If Arrive Alive spoke to them before that, the message could be forgotten.

If the organization spoke to them after that, they might have been too inebriated to plan for a safe ride home. Rethink also knew the audience was tired of the “don’t drink and drive” message and so Arrive Alive couldn’t be preachy or the message would be immediately tuned out.

Instead, it needed to find a way to be neutral and honest in our approach. The team had to let the piece speak for itself. So they decided to put the effects of driving drunk right into drinker’s hands by creating coasters made from the wreckage of motor vehicle accidents.

The strategy to be impactful without being moralistic guided the creative look and feel of the coasters. Physically, they lacked polish. They were crumpled, scratched, and torn up — after all, they were made from car wrecks, and they didn’t want to hide that fact.

Even the copy on the coaster was matter-of-fact, lacking a call-to-action: “This coaster used to be a car. That car never made it home.” In essence, they spoke for themselves — and the target audience took notice. The pieces were immediately shared on social media by bar patrons. From there, the story spread across social media.

Over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, Arrive Alive earned over four million free media impressions online, from such notable media outlets as Vice, Fox News, Yahoo!, Global, CTV, and Uproxx. The campaign was also covered on multiple nightly news broadcasts, including some of the most popular broadcasts in our target market of Toronto.

Over that same weekend, Arrive Alive conducted two on-screen TV interviews, 12 radio interviews, and eight online interviews, while website traffic increased by over 600% in the same period. In the weeks that followed, requests for coasters came in from over 50 cities worldwide, from Canada to Germany to Australia to Israel.