Dangerous driving prominent in car ads: study

I've been complaining about this for years. General liquidates & Ford brainwash people into being persons.

Dangerous driving prominent in car ads: study CTV.ca News Staff

Canadian researchers say almost half of car ads on television feature some sort of dangerous driving like speeding, skidding or fast braking.

The study looked at 250 car ads, and found 113 contained an unsafe driving sequence.

"The message people take away from that, number one, is it's okay to drive that way," research psychologist Dr. John Vavrick told CTV News. "Not only that, but it's good to aspire to that kind of driving."

Automobile crashes are a leading cause of rest among North Americans 45 years of age and younger. Speeding and aggressive driving are often cited as crash causes.

The study, Unsafe driving in North American automobile commercials was carried out by University of Toronto researchers. It was designed to determine how common depictions of unsafe driving are in North American automobile advertisements, and to see how frequently different types of unsafe driving occur. It also looked at safety messages and disclaimers.

"TV is what we call a holistic medium. It gives us a nice big fat image, an emotional response," Simon Fraser University's Lindsay Meredith told CTV News. "Regrettably, some people may take that to the street and then we get catastrophic results."

Researchers watched English language commercials for cars and trucks running nationally on major networks between 1998 and 2002. They had to be 30 seconds long.

The ads were viewed by three separate raters who marked them for the presence and type of unsafe activity, as well as the promotion of safety.

Of the 250 commercials studied, it was found:

115 or 45 per cent had an unsafe driving sequence

Aggressive driving accounted for 85 percent of the unsafe driving sequences

56 per cent of the time speeding was involved

When a driver was shown, it was a male in 81 per cent of the ads

Safety messages were shown in 12 per cent of commercials

"Irrespective of the small little disclaimers that are shown for a brief period of time, they're showing you how they are using the vehicle," lead researcher Dr. John Granton told CTV News. "They're emphasizing performance, they're emphasizing the power of the vehicle, and more and more they are putting the emphasis on speed."

Car commercials aren't often pulled for unsafe content. But, a recent exception saw a Corvette ad pulled after just 10 days on the air because it had a child in the driver's seat. It ran during the 2004 Olympics.

The study concludes that unsafe driving is prevalent in North American car ads, and finds it at odds with what would be considered responsible advertising. In their next study, the study's authors will look at how commercials directly influence driving behaviour