Saatchi's Sam Wise on Making Road Crossings Smarter

Last week, Direct Line and Saatchi & Saatchi London unveiled the prototype for a revolutionary new piece of road tech: a 'smart' pedestrian crossing which could reduce traffic and pedestrian accidents.

Developed in partnership with urban design firm Umbrellium, the campaign seeks to reduce the 7,000 annual road traffic accidents taking place at crossings due to a lack of visibility. The clever crossing can distinguish automatically between vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, thanks to computer vision technology that “sees” exactly what’s happening around it, and features an LED road surface able to adapt its markings and signals dynamically in real-time to keep its users safe.

Today sees the release of an in-depth case study film, detailing the creation and development of The Smart Crossing, which you can watch below. We also caught up with Sam Wise, head of planning at Saatchi & Saatchi London, to find out more about the activation.

Sam Wise, head of planning, Saatchi & Saatchi London

As a category, insurance advertising can be fairly formulaic and bland – how important was it to break the mould with this new activation?

It’s crucial to do mould-breaking work with Direct Line. Insurance can be a very lean-back category: it’s something people grudgingly buy and definitely don’t want to use, so it’s a struggle to make people feel it’s relevant to them. That’s why The Smart Crossing matters to us. It’s a chance to make people think again about the role a company that understand risk and innovation can play in their everyday lives.

What was the biggest challenge you encountered in developing the tech?

Keeping it real. When you’re dealing with risk and safety, stunts are not okay, and Tomorrow’s World-style innovation for its own sake is gratuitous. Working with traffic experts, being sensitive to decades of UK road design, and making responsive tech that stood up to testing all took time and money, but without them, our project would be meaningless.

The tech aims to avoid accidents caused, in part, by people engrossed in their smartphones – is there an argument that we shouldn’t be facilitating this sort of behaviour? Do you expect it to be welcomed by everyone, particularly as it places more of an onus on drivers?

Idiotic smartphone use isn’t going to go away. This isn’t about encouraging people to act like idiots, it’s about providing a buffer zone between people acting like an idiot and a car accident. Being lit up in ‘danger’ red while a driver does an emergency stop in front of you, will not be a pleasant experience, but you should recover from it more quickly than from being run over. It won’t be welcomed by everyone, but innovation never is.

How do you intend to bring the prototype to market?

Bringing a prototype to market is a long process - just ask Elon Musk. We see it as a slow, but necessary journey of testing, iterating and rolling out the technology to new cooperative venues. When you’re dealing with safety it is, rightly, a process of earning trust. But we’re confident we can, as we’ve already had success with our first prototype service, Fleetlights, a drone-based street lighting service which was recently trialled in a coastal rescue situation.

This is a great example of ‘goodvertising’, but do you think it’s necessary for every brand to aim to change the world for the better?

Every brand came into this world to serve their customers in some way. And as big brands’ capabilities expand, they would do well to ask themselves how to renew their original missions in the 21st century while staying true to what they stand for. We exist to fix problems, the brand is the input, any social good is one of many potential outputs in the service of reminding people what we do and how we do it.