New RTA Ad Campaign
June 27, 2007 by George Skentzos
Well I’m sure by now we have all seen the pinky-wiggling ad campaign taking a stab at men’s ego’s in what is ironically a message against speeding. Odd perhaps considering the ‘maneuvers’ these guys are performing would place them still well below the speed limit. Realistically it is an ad condemning reckless driving and is aimed literally below the belt in a misguided presumption of why ‘hooning’ occurs.
It seems to me, after viewing the video, a more appropriate ad slogan would have been “keep it on the track”. Considering entire sports have been created based on the events depicted in the ad – sports which are enjoyed by both men and women – more due care should have been made not to associate the reckless activities of these driver’s with a sport which requires a high degree of skill and dedication.
It was a severely misguided campaign manager who presumed that women were the cause of reckless driving. Even more misguided to think the old lady sitting on the bench was not just as likely, if not more, to drive through the pedestrian crossing without giving way. Perhaps a teenage girl on her phone would have made more sense than a young male so totally absorbed with his mid-80s car that he forgets to stop at the crossing – ironic considering it was an attractive woman crossing at the time, by my calculations he should have done a burnout.
Perhaps most dangerous of all is the message they have unknowingly conveyed with the blue VL drifting (term used loosely). The scene ends with a passenger making said pinky gesture. Unfortunately among young adolescent males this does not mean, “Gosh! That was irresponsible!” A more accurate translation would be, “Here, try it again around this corner, but this time give it more throttle”.
I fail to see the factor which deters drivers from this behaviour. Perhaps encouraging the use of open race tracks would help drivers realise there is a much easier and safer way to enjoy their car’s.
George Skentzos
Print it: 
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QUOTE = a young male so totally absorbed with his mid-80s car that he forgets to stop at the crossing – ironic considering it was an attractive woman crossing at the time, by my calculations he should have done a burnout.
QUOTE = Unfortunately among young adolescent males this does not mean, “Gosh! That was irresponsible!” A more accurate translation would be, “Here, try it again around this corner, but this time give it more throttle”.
LOL. Quality.
I watched it, and i got the message and i’m 18. I often think what a tosser/knob/wanker when i see some try hard doing a burnout in his sh!tty old VL/VN commodore or i think, hmm an idiot with too much money, too little brains when i see someone in a newish falcon/commodore doing a burnout. The point the advertisement is getting at is the knobs doing the burnouts think it makes them look good when in fact it makes them look try hard. It is well known that people my age do stuff to impress others, by trying to look tough and fearless because they think people will think.. WOW he is soo cool. The ad points out that while the knob jockey doing the burnout thinks he’s cool. Everyone else thinks he’s just another idiot trying to impress others.
This advertisement infuriates me so much with is both sexist and money wasting ventures I’m going to START doing these things.
Also I would gladly do this sort of stuff on a track or a massive skidpan if one was readily available. I want to enjoy my car, not hurt anybody.
i understand where this ad is coming from, I’m and 18yr old p-plater, and yes i put my hand up i have done stupid things behind the wheel, but thats the thing, everyone has been young once and 10 bucks says everyone with a licences has done something stupid. I’m not saying its right to do the things like that, but instead of spending millions of bucks on advertisments, theys should be spending it on putting L and P platers through advanced driving course and skid pans so we can learn how to control and understand the cars we drive, and hopefully scare the living S#%t out of us so we don’t behave like that, also open up the race tracks around the state and the country so us ‘hoons’ can let are pent up hooness in safe and controlled area.
50 years from now a 17-18 year old will still be doing burnouts or street drags soon after getting his licence. Points is, this sort of behaviour is probably not going to change among young men.
so, if i drive like a grandad camry driver…. ill get a bigger cock!!
wow!! the add has worked for me!
hmmm…. An advertisement about speeding showing manoeuvres that would have taken place well below the posted speed limit?
Perhaps the RTA was considering ’speeding below the speed limit’, ie; travelling faster than is suitable for a certain manoeuvre: approaching a pedestrian crossing, taking a corner — although I still fail to see how it applies to the XR. And I also fail to see how the ’speeding’ message is supposed to stick when it comes from a government (I’m from Vic, but it’s the same in NSW) that sends the message ‘if you’re below the posted speed limit you’re safe’, unfortunately the message of safe handling speed is no longer something the state governments feel motorists need to be aware of.
Perhaps a more effective advertisement would have shown the damage done to the cars or the cost of upkeep when being a hoon. Tyres, Wheel alignment, transmission & clutch. Otherwise a ticker showing fuel consumption & the current cost of petrol: ahh, now THAT would be effective ;o)
Ford won’t be happy about this, buying a new Falcon means you have a small dick? Oh dear.
Well Im going to do some drifting now… they stop commercials like that one with the baby driving a Santa Fe becauses kids might do that and their have been other case, Im confident when Im in court after getting done for reckless driving this defence will serve me well… I was just doing what I saw on TV.
Yes, driving below the speed limit is really safe…..
Now, can someone give me the guys number, so I can call him and tell him about how I nearly lost my life minding my own business doing 40km/h in a 50 zone just after taking off from an intersection when someone in the far right land decided to cut across all three lanes and t-bone me, because he decided that NOW was the time he should get in the left hand lane.
I don’t blame him, he didn’t see me. He probably didn’t do a head check and just looked in his mirrors. But we were both doing about 40 km/h.
10km/h below the speed limit in this section of the Sydney CBD.
I nearly lost my life because of that accident, I was on a motorcycle. This guy wasn’t a hoon, wasn’t a teen, wasn’t a P plater or an L plater.
Anyway, new drivers will always do silly things. I have. I sometimes still do. We all speed, we all accelerate on the amber lights when we “could” have stopped. We’ve all talked on mobiles, changed CD’s, etc etc etc.
At the end of the day it really just comes down to driver education. And although a lot of new cars have some great gadgets and gizmos to make driving safer and better. I think cars are more detached from the road then ever, and thus the driver too.
I actually just got to see the advert just now while sitting in front of the TV, on the couch with my laptop. I also noticed how every “hoon” appears to be a bloke. Driving around my part of Sydney, I run into more aggressive female drivers then males. The P-plater males tend to sit low in their seat and prefer cruising with the sub woofers shaking the shop windows.
9 times out of 9, someone is up my rear end while driving, it’s a female P plater in a VL, WRX, VN Commi, Honda CRX. etc.
Why don’t they show these drivers doing the things the blokes in the ad are doing? It’s only fair and equal, right?
Personally I think it’s part of the growing up thing. Every 17 does something like that in their first car. I’m a firm believer that a place for such antics should be made available to “hooligans”. I’d be there daily. :)
Totally agree with ya steve, i’m a p-plater and i have to agree with ya about young female drives, they are very aggresive behind the wheel, i know there are some females out there which aren’t like that, but most of the time they are right up behind me.
And like i said in my previous post, if they open all the tracks up around the state/country us teens will be letting out are steam in a safe controlled enviroment, with driving instructors there to help them if they need help, i.e eastern creek they are like that, but its once a month and costs $250, most P-platers can’t fill there tank to the top, how r they supposted to get in have some fun.
Venting Done, thanks
Have to agree with the narrow focus Steve. I just wonder if they’ll ever make a track for the real young driver menace on our road: female P-Platers texting while driving.
;o)
(sorry for double post. Just read that… narrow focus = male drivers only)
Wait, is there any speeding whatsoever in this advertisement?
One does a burnout, the other fails to stop at a pedestrian crossing and the third gets his car sideways, none of this is caused by or relates to speeding, does it?!
I think a campaign focusing on taking it to the track would have been a great idea.
Nevertheless, as a paramedic the majority of cases I deal with involving injury or death resulting from hooning, a male is at fault. A teenager, no. Twenty and up, yes.
Watching these guys ball their eyes out and piss their pants is not a pretty sight, nor is working on a driver as his friend lies half inside the car and half on the road. It’s not selfish for me to say I’d prefer the driver be in that position, and his mate en route to hospital, it’s human.
They don’t understand how easy it is for their vehicle to crumble into the smallest shell of metal. They don’t understand how within a split second that can happen to them. They don’t understand that they have no right to put other peoples lives at risk, for their own enjoyment.
There are some fucking stupid people on the road here in QLD and it’s unfortunate that some of us have to clean up their mess.
When you look at it that way, yes it’s bad. I have many times watched someone fly up to an intersection and brake really hard and stop. I sit there and think “what if their brakes “let go” one day?
It’s not so much the result I’m interested in. It’s how the driver would handle the situation.
When I did my motorcycle rider training all those years ago, we learnt to emergency brake, we learnt to lock up just so we could figure out how to release and squeeze again. Effectively we learnt to be the ABS and Traction Control for our vehicles of choice.
This all comes down to the driver license test which I have mentioned about before many months ago. You go around a corner. You stop. You park. Hill start. Drive back to the RTA.
I reckon the money spent on installing and maintaining speed cameras can be used for building dedicated car driving courses where there is grease, sand, pedestrians that pop out of bushes. Faulty traffic lights, bad drivers (the instructors can have fun with that one). Road rage. etc etc.
Get the user off-road. Teach them to control the car if it loses traction. Whether it’s caused from faulty ABS, braking too hard, misjudging a corner and freaking out. Whatever.
Much like a motorcycle license, I think this should be made compulsory.
By my rule, if you have to drive 50 hours on your L’s before you can go for your P’s. If you take the average driver training with a learner driving trainer (ABC driving school, etc) and pay $60 an hour. You’re looking a fair amount of money to get your license. Why not use that money to do a weekend course on really “driving” a car.
I’m not referring to teaching how to do power slides, burnouts, etc. I’m talking about pushing the car around a corner, and learning to deal with it if it loses traction.
How to brake without ABS.
Something to think about when you pay all that money for driver training. Even if you don’t. I don’t think anyone here would say no to a weekend of getting a car out of control, just to learn how to get it back into control.
I know at the time when I did my rider training I was thinking “what a drag”. But when we eventually started off, I was like “this is cool” and later on saw how valuable it was to have learnt the skills they taught us.
Steve
Alternatively you can teach a learner to drive on gravel, my dad taught me to drive on gravel with a 86 XF Fairmont on roads with gravel the shape of marbles. If you’ve been here in WA down south you know what i’m talking about. It was hard enough to walk on with out slipping, with a car couldnt do more than 30km/h, even cornering at 20 the car would understeer then once you got that under control randomly go sideways as the wheels fell into other peoples tracks. Then once got past that terrible corrugation that made the car slide around and shake violently, the old XF didnt fall apart so we kept going. Was fun i’d admit but it taught me how to control the vehicle. I dont think it taught me much about braking though as on gravel its best to just let the wheels lock up so they dig in. But i did learn how to go down a steep hill in a car where people in stupid new 4wd’s need hill descent control. All up it taught me to never push a car to its limit, dont ever go near the limit. All these tools who think they are cool doing burnouts and hooning around they only know how to induce a car to do the wrong thing, they probably dont know how to react to a car when it does something unexpected. And i totally agree with what bozwald said, in year 12 we had a cop come talk to us before leavers and he told us a story about how a bloke and his girlfriend where speeding in a escort panelvan and it hit a tree snapped the car in half throwing the bloke out onto the road, he got neck injuries and so on, his girlfriend was cut in half, through the waist and obviously died, now he has to live with that… Nearly all of us remember that story. As for me, i’m nearly off my p’s got 2 months left and i havnt had a speeding ticket or any infringments and i plan on keeping it that way.
It’s a well put together ad, although it’s a shame to think 99% of the people that it is targeting just wont get it.
that was the stupidest ad ive ever seen you are going to make me do more burnouts just to see if any tool waves their pinky at me the rta should get over it and stop messing with p platers
I think Mitch’s post above pretty much sums up the RTA ad and why it applies to a lot of people.
Quote: “that was the stupidest ad ive ever seen you are going to make me do more burnouts just to see if any tool waves their pinky at me”
Why? Why don’t you use common sense and say to yourself… “Wait driving dangerously is stupid. I don’t need to go prove anything by driving dangerously. The RTA is WRONG. Not all of us are influenced so easily, we don’t need to do burnouts and risk lives just to see if anyone will do a pinky. I drive safely therefore this ad does not apply to me.”
Anyone who doesn’t drive safely, this ad does apply to you. Especially you Mitch.
This is a dumb ad, it tries to pin point what men worry about most, and try and attatch it to an ad campagin that has no connection with the topic what so ever, why bother, like trying to strap a bird to a cow and pushing it off a cliff, and expecting it to fly, it will never work, just like this ad!
I think that everyone here who is getting riled up about the technicality of whether the people in the ad are over the speed limit or not are missing the point.
It’s an ad targeting dangerous and irresponsible driving. If the limit’s 60 and you go around a corner at 59kmph out of showmanship then you are putting yourselves and others in unnecessary danger, whether you are under or over the speed limit. Dangerous driving is never impressive, no matter what kind of car you drive and who you are driving it past.
The point of these ads is not to 100% eradicate speeding and dangerous driving once and for all from our society. As other people in this forum have already said, people will always do silly things when they are young. The point is to send a message that this kind of driving is overwhelmingly unwelcome in our society, no matter who you are trying to impress, and thereby hopefully keep the numbers of people who carry out this sort of driving to as low a number as realistically possible.
The roads minister wants to eradicate speeding and make it as socially unacceptable as drink-driving, and yet every where you look in NSW, 100 limits have been painted out and replaced by 80 and so on down the chain. looking around it looks as though at any one time at least 50% (probably more) of drivers are ’speeding’, if the RTA set realistic speed limits in the first place then maybe people would adhere to them. There will always be a minority that will go over the speed limit whatever it is set at.
I must admit, the RTA do come up with some weird ads, and what about ‘Speed kills’, how does that work? If you drive at 130 km/h on the F3 and manage not to lose 1/4 of your license for travelling 20 km/h over the limit, then according to the RTA you are going to die, the fact that the majority of Europe happily travel legally at 130 km/h and don’t die every day is a complete mystery to me.
Yeah I agree some limits are stupid. I can udnerstand why residential areas are 50km/h in fact I support it… but there are many open roads which are limited to 60km/h or 70km/h when they could quite safety be higher. Also a common trend now is when some idiot happens to get hit backlash means RTA reduces limits, even if it was because the vicitm was doing something they shouldnt have been (crossing a 6 lane main road for example)
About time a lady wrote on here!
HOW STUPID IS THIS AD.
Im embarrrrassed for those involved in the making of it.
If it was reversed and about breasts I wouldn’t be offended.. I know if mine are small or not and it has NOTHING to do with speed.
SHOCK TACTICS are much better.. what are u missing advertising people!!!??
yea im 14 and im looking forward to driving a car. im really anxiuos about it too. i get the idea that speeding is really bad, but couldn’t they have had a better ad to show the message. i mean ive watched ads on drinkdriving and they seem to get more to me and my friends. im really shocked at those nasty car accidents. but seriously with this ad the pinkly wiggling thingymajig – thats just too weird. I reckon it wont catch on that much like the other ad(s)- there was one with the ‘tosser’ which i rkn worked heaps better.
Lets see all the hard data about how this ad is “effectively” slowing young males down RTA!
There are plenty of other ways to slow drivers down other than inappropriate attempts at attacking male sexuality. And as others have stated, we all see the plethora of girls racing around, whilst on their mobiles and doing their makeup on the freeways every single day.
I’m sick of being the target of numerous, and uncalled for “Pinky Wiggles” from these same women who think they are model motorists, or have a free ticket to hoon cause they don’t have a penis.
I have these incompetent females give this gesture even when i’m clearly in the right.
It’s getting to the point where women will signal the gesture whenever they see fit.
I can definitely see a spate of road rage incidents because these women take it upon themselves to become traffic wardens. It’s not your job, you suck at it, and you’re clearly in the wrong 90 percent of the time anyway. Then proceed to “Pinky” me??? Where the hell do you get off?
Just the other day i had a woman sit right on my quarter panel as i was trying to merge. I accelerated and then quickly merged in front of her before i hit a parked car, and then this girl proceeded to give me the pinky gesture.
The law states that whoever is in front has the right of way and must allow the other vehicle to merge. I was clearly 3/4 of a car length in front of her. This law is in place to increase traffic flow from merge lanes so we’re not all sitting there stagnant while arrogant drivers (like this lady) whizz past not allowing people in.
So, to the arrogant lady in the black Astra, what am i supposed to do in order to please you? Come to a grinding halt in the merge lane, just so you can go past, and i can keep my masculinity?
My advice to all the men out there who are sick of this treatment, or perhaps just for a giggle. Whenever you see that stupid female on your bumper bar, fumbling for her phone, too busy in the mirror doing her make up, or just plain checking herself out. Jump on the anchors as hard as you can! You are well within your rights to stop suddenly at any given time on the road, and for whatever reason you desire.
The onus is on the trailing driver to allow enough room to successfully brake without crashing up your backside. Most of these women wouldn’t even notice you’ve braked until their bonnet is folding in front of their eyes.
Let’s teach these stupid women a lesson and get on the brakes!
Maybe that’ll teach them to pay attention and have two hands on the wheel at all times instead of trying to insult us with their “Pinky Wiggles”
They’ll probably get out of their crippled cars, giving the “Pinky Wiggle” excitedly and laughing hysterically while on the phone to the cops thinking they’ll side with the “saintly” female driver. But the jokes on them! If they actually knew some road rules they’d know it’s a Neg driving charge for slamming up the back of someone. Sorry love, that’s 3 demerit points, $300 dollars, your insurance premiums are double next year, and thanks giving me a nice shiny new car.
Wiggle Wiggle
i believe… ur all fags