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news
see their side advert screenshotControversial See their Side ad campaign officially scrapped by Transport for London
Transport for London representatives announced yesterday that the controversial ‘See their Side’ advertising campaign, which sparked an online backlash last year over claims of “victim-blaming” and promoting a “false equivalence” among road users, has been officially stopped.
The advertising campaign, which had a planned spend of almost £1 million, featured an angry altercation after a driver's car and a cyclist almost make contact. The inner monologues of both the driver and cyclist in the video show that they realise they have "scared" each other, leading to new-found empathy between the pair.
The advert was met with fierce criticism on social media for suggesting that the driver's fear of an angry cyclist from the relative safety of their car seat is equivalent to a cyclist's fear of almost being killed or seriously injured, and that all road users should share equal responsibility for incidents.
> Reaction as Transport for London pauses See their Side ad campaign following backlash
It was also noted that the position of the cyclist's foot centimetres away from the car 10 seconds into the clip implies that the driver likely committed an offence by overtaking the cyclist too closely.
Following this backlash, the campaign was “paused” at the beginning of December. However, it was later revealed that a TfL official asked VCCP, the agency responsible for the video, if they could digitally amend the advert to remove evidence of the dangerous overtake.
A VCCP executive also expressed concern that they were “bowing to the minority” by suspending the campaign, despite TfL’s own research indicating that the reaction to it was “very negative”. A TfL official even said that they were confident the ad would be “back on air in January.”
UPDATE: The duff "See their side" advert has now been officially "stopped" not suspended, revealed @tfl officials in @LondonAssembly committee meeting today. @willnorman confirmed he did not see ad beforehand. @neil-garratt asked the questions https://t.co/drYCV7TYmH
— Carlton Reid (@carltonreid) January 11, 2022
However, that has not proved the case and in yesterday’s committee meeting of the London Assembly it was announced that the campaign had officially been stopped.
Will Norman, the Mayor of London's Walking and Cycling Commissioner, confirmed in the meeting that he wasn't consulted at any stage of the process and did not actually see the advert before it was published. Instead, the campaign was signed off by two customer directors and TfL's Head of Customer Marketing and Behaviour Change following "engagement with some 27 external organisations."
When asked whether the problem with the scrapped campaign centred on the advert itself or simply the reaction to it, Norman replied, “No, I did not see the advert before it went out, and I wasn’t a fan of it when I did.”
Defending the intent behind the advertisement, the Chief Safety, Health and Environment Officer for TfL Lilli Matson said that it “was quite carefully researched beforehand. The whole point of the advert is that it is not clear if anyone is at fault. All you see is a nasty altercation, and the whole point is that it has both participants reflecting on it.
“I did see the advert before it went out, and I did comment on it and we made some changes to it.”
Despite the overwhelmingly negative response, Matson also claimed that during follow-up research conducted by TfL many focus group participants had a “light bulb” moment concerning the advert’s aim to promote “empathy and recognition” amongst all road users.
However, she admitted that the ad “didn’t have the stakeholder reaction that we wanted, which muddied the very issue we were trying to do.”
“Trying to intervene in something as complex as road safety culture is a very difficult thing. It was quite a brave attempt to try to do this.
"We don’t think the advert was effective ultimately, so we’ve stopped it. But it was trying to do something new, trying to generate awareness and empathy. We need to look at it and try to learn from it.”
Despite his objections to the campaign, Norman stressed that the negative response to the advert should not prevent TfL from grappling with difficult issues surrounding road users’ attitudes.
“We have to tackle the culture on London’s roads,” he said. “We’ve done an awful lot of marketing around behaviour, in terms of speeding, drink driving and all those things.
“But there is still a culture of ‘everyone in it for themselves’. It’s a huge challenge and we have to be able to think innovatively and differently about this.
“Clearly the reaction to this advert isn’t what anybody would have wanted. It has been stopped, but I still believe we need to do work on how we change the culture on London’s roads.
“I wouldn’t want the issues that happened with that advert to affect the team’s ability to address what is a really challenging problem.”
Norman also said that the fall out from the advert has led to the implementation of a new, more collaborative system when it comes to producing campaigns on road safety and culture in London.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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26 comments
Having rooted about for other PSA's on another thread I remembered this one by the DoE from 7 years back. Maybe the DfT should have taken a leaf out of their book
https://youtu.be/dXXwtP0MWKo
The faults are so many, it is almost unbelievable:
What was the brief - if its about human behaviour then just post the comments section from the Daily Mirror after a cyclist has been killed
Who were the agencies - 27 of them and nobody picked up on presumed liability, accountability, consequence and the close pass
The research - well we can do research to essentially 'prove' any view you want and as has been suggested interpretation is key
Involving stakeholders - relatively simple concept
To go forwards, Norman:
"It has been stopped, but I still believe we need to do work on how we change the culture on London’s roads. I wouldn’t want the issues that happened with that advert to affect the team’s ability to address what is a really challenging problem".
First you have to prove you've learnt from the problems, though I can help:
Too many cyclists are killed on London's roads - campaigns similar to 'more than a cyclist' and 'operation close pass' required
Too many aggressive drivers using their vehicle as a weapon - address the cowardice and danger of this
Lack of driver understanding of rules - inform them about filtering, helmet wearing, road tax, cycle lanes
Some cyclists going for gaps that put them at risk - educate them on the danger to themselves
Some drivers and cyclist having fisticuffs - no pre-amble required, basically this is violence and shouldn't be condoned
Nice summary
I don't want to have to empathise with a an operator of heavy machinery who's almost killed me.
I don't want any interaction at all.
I want drivers to obey the HWC, and keep well away.
I know its been said before, but I would so love to know who were these 27 external organisations with whom they "engaged", and what was the level of their engagement.
"TfL's Head of Customer Marketing and Behaviour Change....." I'm sure they'll be busy tidying up their cv and sending it out because they've been sacked for incompetence.
"Defending the intent behind the advertisement, the Chief Safety, Health and Environment Officer for TfL Lilli Matson said that it “was quite carefully researched beforehand." No.
"We need to look at it and try to learn from it.” Yes; that you have to consult with user groups and your own Walking and Cycling Commissioner.
To be honest, pretty much everyone involved in this fiasco should be looking for a new job, as they clearly don't have a clue about the one they're paid to do now.
TBF we don't know that. They may well have carefully researched it, then handed said research to the advertising agency...
...who cheerfully ignored or failed to understand it and produced something that completely undermined it.
The SHE chief utterly failed to identify one of the key stakeholders, in the shape of Will Norman, and get him to the table. On that level I'm dubious how she can be sure it was carefully researched, when stakeholder selection was so slap dash - getting the right input is part of the research.
Road.cc says he says he 'wasn't consulted', but in the quote given all he actually says is he wasn't shown the advert, which isn't quite the same thing.
[Edit] and having listened to the clip, that is all he says - he doesn't say anything about whether he was consulted earlier in the process.
No that's fair, and having listened to the SHE chief it seems that it might not have been her project per se, she was also a stakeholder and not responsible or accountable for the project itself.
In that clip he doesn't, although road.cc seems to be pretty categoric that he stated that he wasn't consulted - I wonder if they can enlighten us on teh source?
In any case the film was published without engaging a key stakeholder fully - this seems a big oversight, although it is common. One of the parts of any project is determining the RACI, and how SH interacts accordingly for the gateway criteria to be satisfied.
And particularly common where delivery is outsourced to an external agency, particularly if you just 'let them get on with it because they're the experts'. You can do all the research you like, but it's going to be of limited use if those doing the research are disconnected from those in charge of delivery - the understanding of that research is unlikely to carry over.
When the initial backlash happened, the loudest defences seemed to be coming from the ad agency, which is never a good sign. You'd expect that response to be coming from an accountable person at the commissioning organisation whose mandate is ensuring that the finished product is aligned with the stakeholder goals.
Yes. Ultimately no one wants to take accountability. They try to duck this by passing on responsibility (in house delegation, outsourcing). Whereas delegation is fine by itself, it requires 2 things
Those accountable need to provide those 2 things, otherwise... well, we can see....
Bang on but apparently a universal principle of human interaction. Tragic - but endemic.
What makes you think this wasn't aligned with most stakeholder goals / the overall organisation? Trying to see it from outside "cycling"... I mean there are now recriminations but the responses seem to signal "we're sorry we got caught - and a bit baffled especially when we thought we were improving things". This whole ad is progress in many ways - someone has seen the cyclist(s). More? You don't suggest the minority (with no cash) should start dictating to the majority?
As I said, I don't. I think we don't know whether it was or not. If I had to guess, I'd say probably whoever was supposed to be responsible for it at TfL didn't have a clear idea what those goals were in the first place, and then allowed the agency to decide that for them, but unless someone's prepared to step up and give an account of the process, we're not really going to know.
Policy research tends to involve putting out a 'call for views' from a list someone in the policy team has and seeing who responds. It's a critically flawed approach for situations with a minority (like cyclists vs. drivers) because the many driving organisations/groups will have said "ooh yes that looks like a wonderful advert because those nasty cyclists are always so mean to us when we nearly kill them" and the one (probably sustrans) cycling representative will have been drowned out.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that they did do 'careful research' - only that we don't know if they did. Regardless, though, the impression is that whatever research they did do was pretty much ignored, because the agency were driving the brief instead of the client.
I'm not sure I'd agree the agency drove the brief, unless theres evidence TfL got something they didnt expect, the issue was everyone got what they thought they wanted but it still ended up to be the wrong thing.
And I'll keep repeating it was not a campaign about cycling road safety,its about peoples attitudes, confrontations & behaviours if not just to highlight how difficult that message is to get through without people misinterpreting it and every decision they took stems from that choice.
If they wanted a campaign about people's attitudes (which I think is the wrong brief anyhow), they should have bunged a load of money towards Ogmios and funded a whole series of Zen Driving videos: https://youtu.be/lo3tSswZV7Q?t=560
As I said, that's my impression, based on the way that they led the response to the complaints (and experience of how similar cock-ups have happened). YMMV.
To return to my original point, though - we don't, and can't, know, because nobody's saying.
But as we discussed at length previously the intent of the ad is related to human behaviours in stressful situations, it's not specifically about a road safety topic, they just managed to film a scenario that was all about road safety ultimately more than it was about the human interaction element. And that's why it failed.
"that they were “bowing to the minority” by suspending the campaign"
Was this a conclusion based on
"engagement with some 27 external organisations." ?
Or they simply redefined minority or did a Nicholas Ridley and decided that if you didn't object, you must be in favour.
Translation - it's men against boys (or rather bulls) but we're framing this around a 'need to change the whole "bullfight" culture' rather than not putting the audience in the bullring or taming the bulls.
Actually, Will's ex-Nike - so maybe the analogy should be something about prioritising addressing disquiet on the race track rather than discussing having a separate course for sprinters and equestrians?
Engage corporate defense mode:
"Trying to intervene in something as complex as road safety culture is a very difficult thing. It was quite a brave attempt to try to do this."
Really? I don't think it's that hard once you accept that you are going to offend a small but vocal minority of drivists AND that if you are serious about reducing road KSI's and pollution it simply has to be done.
Even the latest revision of Highway Code has managed it FFS. But what's the betting these twonks never even looked at those changes?
Well that was money well spent. It's a shame there is so little moey for decent infra, that money could have have been spent on white paint.
At the start of the year, TFL would apply budgets to paint and budgets to advert campaigns and budgets to lots of other things. When one is spent on good or bad, it doesn't suddenly take from the other. If it had been spent on a campaign of "Don't turn left at junctions until you have fully confirmed no cyclists are there" and we stated we liked that. Would you have then wanted paint instead? (bearing in mind the effectiveness of both is still questionable).
There is plenty of money for infra - look at the highways budget. It's just almost entirely mis-spent
...and we've concluded that cyclists getting angry when subjected to dangerous driving is the number one topic that needs to be addressed?