TRANSPORT ACCIDENT COMMISSION VICTORIA | MEET GRAHAM | 2017
Evolving Human Fragility Into Something You Can See / Transport Accident Commission Victoria "MEET GRAHAM"
Grotesque, strange, and impossible to look away from. Graham is the only human being ever designed purely to survive on the road. No neck, a thickened skull, twelve airbag-like nipples across his chest, lumpy skin. The moment you see him, you flinch. But buried inside that flinch is a message that really matters.
The problem
Over the past few decades, the state of Victoria had cut road deaths from 1,061 to 252 a year. But that success bred its own problem: indifference. People started thinking "I'm a safe driver" and "crashes happen to other people." For years, the Transport Accident Commission had relied on shock-and-awe tactics, running graphic crash re-creation footage again and again. But Australians had grown numb to it. It stopped working. The new brief from the TAC was: educate Victorians about their own fragility on the road. Another gory crash video wasn't going to teach anyone anything.
The insight
Looking for a different angle, the team found a new path by focusing on the human body itself. Evolutionary science offered a clue: cars have only existed for about 100 years, but the human body has barely changed in 200,000 years. Our bodies are built to handle the kind of impact you get from running into a wall on your own two feet, nothing more. Cars and roads, meanwhile, have always been designed around the human body as it is. So the team flipped the question: what if, instead, we designed a human body around impact? That question is what gave birth to Graham. The goal wasn't fear or guilt, but getting people to think about their own fragility in a completely different way.
The idea
Three people joined forces to create Graham: a trauma surgeon, Christian Kenfield, a road trauma researcher, David Logan, and the acclaimed artist Patricia Piccinini. Drawing on decades of road safety data and medical research, they redesigned the human body. The final sculpture took the form of a man, since the highest-risk group on Australian roads is young male drivers in rural areas. He has multiple airbag-like nipples, a massive skull, and spring-loaded, hoof-like legs. The name "Graham" simply stuck, chosen because it sounded like an ordinary, approachable Australian name. Patricia Piccinini built him as a life-size sculpture, and the team also built in augmented reality technology using Google Tango, letting visitors look beneath Graham's skin to understand his unusual structure. The whole project cost 200,000 Australian dollars (roughly 150,000 US dollars), about a tenth of what a typical campaign costs.
What happened
After debuting at the State Library of Victoria, Graham toured regional areas. In its first week, meetgraham.com.au racked up 10.4 million page views from around the world. It trended on Twitter and Facebook, and was covered by media outlets worldwide including the New York Times, Daily Mail, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, India Today, and Al Jazeera. At Cannes Lions 2017, it won 29 Lions in total, including two Grand Prix awards in Health & Wellness and Cyber, and was a major factor in Clemenger BBDO Melbourne being named Agency of the Year. At D&AD, it won 13 Pencils including the top honor, the Black Pencil. At Ad Stars 2017 it also won the $10,000 Grand Prix of the Year. About 220,000 people came to see the real Graham in person, spending close to four minutes with him on average, far longer than people typically spend with a piece of art.
Afterthought
While I was researching this, I found out that opinions were actually split within the industry. Some called it a PR stunt rather than real advertising, or said it was just designed to win awards. But here's what I think. As the planner Matt Pearce put it, "we never expected it to spread this far." The night before launch, the team was simply hoping that someone, anyone, would get it. And yet it ended up sparking conversations about road safety all over the world. Not through fear, not through lecturing, but simply by giving shape to human fragility and putting it in front of people. That, I think, is the real power of advertising. Graham is ugly. But that ugliness is exactly what reminds us how much we're worth protecting. And what gets me most is something the CEO, Joe Calafiore, said: "Graham will outlive us all." It's probably true, and honestly, that makes me a little emotional.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2017
