Chevrolet's Call Me Out App Is Designed to Save Lives from Distracted Driving

More than one million people die in road crashes every year — and distracted driving is a major risk factor.

Since the advent of the smartphone, awareness campaign after awareness campaign has tried to cajole, convince and scare drivers (especially young drivers) into keeping their hands on the wheel and their eyes off the screen.

There’s just one problem: Awareness campaigns don’t work.

According to study conducted by Research Now, 84 percent of people admit that distracted driving while handling a phone is dangerous, yet a staggering 90 percent admit to doing it anyway. It’s going to take a cultural shift to change how people think and act about distracted driving. And Commonwealth//McCann is helping Chevrolet make it happen with Call Me Out, an app designed to remind drivers to ditch the distractions by combining the extremely influential forces of technology and personal relationships.

Chevrolet saw an opportunity to leverage the influence of peer pressure to incite a positive behavioural change. Knowing the key was to reach young people, the agency launched a hack-a-thon, where teams of young people were challenged to develop a personalised solution to reduce distracted driving. After Call Me Out was decided on as the winning idea and built by the GM IT team, Chevrolet partnered with students at Wayne State University in Detroit to test the app’s effectiveness and to see how well it worked at leveraging the positive influence of peer pressure.

With Call Me Out, users are encouraged to invite friends and family to “call them out” and record a positive message to remind one other to pay attention to the road. The app uses the phone’s accelerometer and GPS to detect when the phone is physically picked up while travelling at speeds above 5 mph and plays recorded, personalised messages from friends and family reminding drivers to put their phones down. The app also includes gamification, featuring a scoreboard and rankings. The less a phone is handled while driving, the higher the score on the leaderboard.

Call Me Out is available exclusively for Android users and can be downloaded for free from the Google Play store. The app is being promoted with a new website, a robust social campaign and a thought-provoking social experiment: “Distracted Driving School.” In a series of videos that will be leveraged on the College Network and through paid social channels (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), an actor posing as a Distracted Driving School representative tries to get students to enroll … with a hidden camera capturing the honest, confused and quizzical reactions from participants and passers-by.

Developed and conceived in conjunction with Commonwealth//McCann, Chevrolet’s Call Me Out program will continue the conversation with additional work including influencer-led content featuring stories and demos, profile pic frames for Facebook and Instagram, radio spots on Spotify featuring true stories of distracted driving, wild postings around college cities and other areas with a high population of young drivers, parking garage takeovers and much more.