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Cheryl Hughes: Do We Have Your Attention?

A couple of days ago, I started singing that song, “Buckle-up for Safety,” from the 1964 National Safety Council ad campaign.  You remember the one.

 

               Buckle up for safety.  Buckle up.

               Buckle up for safety.  Always buckle up.

               Show the world you care, by the belt you wear.

               Get your seat belts buckled.  Everybody buckle up.

I was nine years old when that ad appeared on TV.  It was a nice little jingle, I guess, that’s why I still remember it.  The ad was a gentle nudge toward the importance of seat belt safety.  Evidently, it didn’t get enough people’s attention, because the next ad campaign was a bit more heavy-handed.  A woman in a stylish dress, makeup and perfect hair told the camera that she didn’t wear a seat belt because it wrinkled her dress.  The next screen shot is the same woman in a body cast.

               The Crash Test Dummies followed.  The ads really upped the ante with those.  Poor guys were never allowed to wear seat belts and always went through the windshield head-first, sometimes even losing their heads in the process.  (On a related note, I bought the Crash Test Dummies and their car when Tyco Toys released them in the 1990s.  The set I have currently sells for about $75 on ebay.)

               It seems there are those who don’t respond to the threat of bodily harm, so the ad council pulled out all the stops with the current campaign.  Click-it or Ticket.  If you don’t wear your seat belt, it will cost you money.  That usually gets even the most ardent “Ten-feet tall and bullet-proof” driver’s attention—in America, anyway.  Yeah, they probably should have started with that one.

               In order for a person to take any threat seriously, the threat has to be believable, a universal threat, so to speak, like speed limits in a school zone.  Once, I was in traffic court with a truck driver who had been pulled over for driving his semi through a school zone at 20 MPH over the speed limit.  It wasn’t pretty.  The judge let the driver speak, but then proceeded to throw the book at him.  It got my attention.

               I’m a pretty easy sell when it comes to ad campaigns.  The woman in the body cast made a seat belt believer out of me.  Another winner from the ad council—in my book anyway—was the egg in the hot skillet.  You remember.  “This is your brain.  This is your brain on drugs.  Any questions?”  I grew up very sheltered, really more like very controlled.  When I left home at 18, I ran into a world I’d only heard about.  On a college campus in 1973, drugs were plentiful.  They were not a temptation to me, however, because the last thing I wanted was one more thing that was going to control my life.  I saw real quick that with drugs, it takes more and more to give you less and less, and I had had all I wanted of less and less.  I was tired of being poor, so I saved my money.  I didn’t spend it on drugs.

               People are unique, not just our DNA, but also our experiences, our backgrounds.  Once when our daughters, Natalie and Nikki were children, Natalie was holding a bottle for Nikki while I drove—they were both buckled into the back seat.  Nikki wasn’t much interested in the bottle, and instead of drinking the milk, she had the nipple in the side of her mouth, chewing on it.

               “Are you gonna drink it or smoke it?” Natalie asked.

               Evidently, Nikki decided to smoke it, because the next sound I heard was Natalie giving Nikki a slight smack on her leg.  “Now, does that get your attention?” Natalie asked.

               Nikki just shifted the nipple to the other side of her mouth and continued chewing.

               I guess it didn’t.

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