A year on from launch of its “Seat Belters” campaign, Allianz Ireland has revealed data that strongly makes the case for how music can help change behaviours.
Last year Allianz Ireland teamed up with Forsman & Bodenfors and Spotify for a road-safety campaign that used the streaming service’s API to design drivers personalised playlists, a tempo of under 80 beats per minute, based on research suggesting slower music can promote calmer decision-making, steadier heart rates and improved reaction times.
Research suggests songs with lower BPM – such as Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran or When the Party’s Over by Billie Eilish – can promote steadier heart rates, calmer decisions and increased response time, influencing more relaxed, controlled driving overall.
According to Allianz, “Seat Belters” has generated nearly 25m views across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, alongside more than 500,000 engagements.
Across markets including Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Australia and the United Kingdom, the campaign has reached 134 million people, with more than 66,800 users creating personalised playlists, accounting for over 5.4m minutes of what Allianz describes as “safer driving music.”
“With constant distraction and time pressure, traditional road-safety messages have to compete for attention like never before,” said Mark Brennan, chief marketing officer at Allianz Ireland. “Seat Belters reflects a new way insurers can influence behaviour, using technology to make safer choices easier by default.”
Damian Hanley, executive creative director at Forsman & Bodenfors, said the idea was to reposition music as an everyday safety tool. “Music sits beside every driver in every car in the world,” he said. “We realised it can be either a good companion or a bad one, so we wanted to turn it into a safety message people could listen to every single day.”
Allianz said it is now exploring how the learnings from the campaign and its collaboration with Spotify can be extended to further promote safer driving behaviours.
The campaign reflects a broader trend in marketing toward interventions that prioritise participation and behavioural outcomes over traditional awareness metrics, particularly in areas such as road safety where excess speed remains a leading factor in fatal crashes globally.
