Vodafone’s breakthrough bike safety technology

Get bike commuters in European cities
Who are looking for safety on the roads
To feel excited about our new bike safety product
By communicating its tech capabilities with a universally recognised influencer.

The challenge

Vodafone was launching a breakthrough new bike safety product that would radically improve road safety and even potentially save lives of commuters in busy cities across Europe.

The consumer cycling market is saturated with tech solutions, so it was going to be an uphill struggle to achieve standout across European markets. The product needed a creative PR activation with a universally recognizable influencer to shift the product launch up a gear. 

I was engaged by the award-winning Havas PR agency, One Green Bean, to put the pedal to the metal to dream up a creative concept in just two days. 

Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

The truth

One of the worst things about bicycle commuting is the bike rage. Drivers hate cyclists, bikers hate cyclists, cyclists hate drivers, bikers hate drivers - you get it, everyone hates everyone.

The roads needed a referee, so we approached retired Fifa Referee and no-nonsense skin-head, Pierluigi Collina, to play referee between drivers and cyclists and talk some safety sense into road users.

The idea

Collina had refereed some of the biggest rivalries in the history of the beautiful game. Now he was going to referee the biggest rivalry of all, cyclists vs motorists, with help from some breakthrough technology. We knew that football is a beautiful and universally loved game that unites our European markets. Collina’s infamously pragmatic approach to football made him the perfect choice to present the safety features of the Vodafone bike tracker. We developed a creative treatment and rough script and the talented legends at One Green Bean turned it into an epic brand film.