Texting While Driving PSAThe new public service announcement warning teens of the perils of texting while driving is violent, bloody and graphic. Even in a world with increasingly tough and graphic public service announcements on TV about the dangers of such activities as smoking, a recent PSA originating out of Gwent, Wales, breaks new boundaries in the explicit level of its bloody details.
Two teen girls giggle over a text message they are sending while driving along a country road. Distracted, the driver smashes head-on into another car, and while the bloodied girls exchange dazed glances, a third car careens into the passenger side. The driver finds her friend lying dead next to her. Then the camera switches to another smashed vehicle and shows a young child inside, asking why her parents are not waking up.
Produced by the Gwent Police Department, the PSA sends out a horrible visual to illustrate the dangers of texting while driving. But it currently isn’t being aired on U.S. television. For Americans to even view the ad on YouTube, they must assert they are at least 18.
Warning from Wales
A South Wales community of 550,000 that many Americans have never even heard of seems an unlikely place for discussion of the dangers of texting-and-driving to be raised, but a visionary Gwent police department was up to the task. Police locked arms with filmmaker Peter Watkins-Hughes to produce the PSA, titled “COW — The Film That Will Stop You Texting and Driving,” named after the character Cassie Cowan, who unleashes the lethal chain of events by texting behind the wheel.
