Analysis Of The Cost Of Distracted Driving

“What are you doing?! Look up!” is possibly what every viewer was yelling to the protagonist of the ad, “The Cost of Distracted Driving”, while pulling their hair out. This emotionally loaded ad is the work of the victorious high school and college students who entered and won Project Yellow Light’s film competition to convince others to become safer drivers on the road. Their sponsor, Project Yellow Light, created by Julie Lowell and Alex Garner, is an organization dedicated to raising awareness of the need to stop texting while driving due to the family’s lost of son and brother, Hunter Garner, who passed under similar circumstances. Due to this, the family’s organization and project has been around for several years and has come to establish

After, the screen turns black and reads, “In 1987, the cost to use a phone was 25¢,” and transports the audience back to this time period as they see the protagonist walking towards her car. However, the viewer witnesses a drastic change in scenery as this female comes to shift into a familiar, modern looking, young, woman who climbs in her car, phone glued to her hand, and texts away into her death as another car nears and presumably crashes into her. The end screen then reads, “Today, it could cost you your life.” That being said, this PSA is incredibly effective in not only communicating, but convincing the audience of their main argument: do NOT text and drive. The visual rhetoric present, from the protagonist’s hairdo to the written message on screen, perfectly comes together to logically allow the audience to understand the story and implied message while also being logically swayed to change their hazardous driving

The strength of such is found in the manner in which the music and sound effects are placed throughout the ad. The first half of the ad contains little to no sound as the protagonist attempts to make a call on a payphone, yet once the viewer is introduced to the modern scene, there is an almost instant eerie and dark background music playing that clues in the viewer that an unfavorable event is soon to take place and calls forth a sense of unease and anxiety. This music only comes to increase in volume as the protagonist enters her car and begins to drive, in which the music combines with the car engine’s roaring that indicates the fast speed she is driving in. The audience then comes to suddenly hear her typing away on her cell phone and the sound of another car. The intensity of emotions is found once this car is also seen on screen, and then silence occurs with only the faint beating of a heart that stops while the viewer read the words, “Today it could cost you your life.” This then, causes the viewer to feel grief and sorrow. Thus, this PSA affects the viewer emotionally as it briefly introduces them to a female that, in context, loses her life due to her lack of attention on the road. The emotions that this PSA elicits are shock, guilt, and fear, among others. The shock