Using music as a road-safety behaviour-change tool

As road safety challenges evolve, brands are looking beyond traditional awareness campaigns to find new ways of influencing behaviour in everyday moments. Allianz Ireland created Seat Belters to explore how creativity, technology and data could be applied to make safer driving a more natural part of daily life.

How music can help with road safety

With excess speed linked to more than half of fatal road crashes worldwide, road safety today is less about raising awareness and more about driving real-world behavioural change. Allianz saw an opportunity to reach drivers through a universal, everyday medium that emotionally connects with people and has been scientifically shown to influence behaviour – music.

Allianz and Forsman & Bodenfors created Seat Belters in collaboration with Spotify to leverage the streaming giant’s unique application programming interface to create personalised playlists for drivers that only included songs with a lower beats per minute (BPM), specifically under 80 BPM.

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.

Mark Brennan, Allianz Ireland’s Chief Marketing Officer, said: “In a world of constant distraction and time pressure, traditional road-safety messages have to compete for attention like never before. Seat Belters reflects a new way insurers like Allianz can influence behaviour – using technology to make safer choices easier by default.

“Rather than relying on warnings or shock tactics, the campaign removes friction from everyday driving. By combining personalisation, entertainment and behavioural data, it turns music into an active safety tool, with learnings that extend beyond road safety into wider areas of wellbeing and behavioural change.”

Seat Belters was launched a year ago with a social-first campaign that quickly accelerated into a global conversation, with nearly 25 million views across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, and over 500,000 engagements across all social platforms.

To date, across Ireland, Austria, Hungary, Australia and the UK, where the campaign ran, the Seat Belters conversation has reached 134 million people with 66,827 users and counting, creating a safer driving playlist. Consciously committing to changing their driving behaviours. That’s more than 5.4 million minutes of safer driving music generated so far.

Broader marketing and social-behaviour research shows that meaningful engagement, such as clicks, shares, and active participation, is strongly linked to later behaviour change. A major meta-analysis found that behavioural engagement is an early and reliable sign of action-taking.

Damian Hanley, Forsman & Bodenfors’ Executive Creative Director, said: “Music sits beside every driver in every car in the world. 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 is currently exploring how the learnings from Seat Belters and the collaboration with Spotify can further amplify the campaign’s playlists and promote safer driving habits.

The most popular low-BPM songs from Seat Belters global campaign were:

—  Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran.
—  I Wanna Be Yours by Arctic Monkeys.
—  Someone Like You by Adele.
—  Perfect by Ed Sheeran.
—  All of Me by John Legend.
—  Let Her Go by Passenger.
—  Say You Won’t Let Go by James Arthur.
—  Lovely by Billie Eilish & Khalid.
—  When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars.
—  The Night We Met by Lord Huron, Pheobe Bridgers.
—  Fix You by Coldplay.
—  When The Party’s Over by Billie Eilish.
—  Until I Found You by Stephen Sanchez.
—  Shallow by Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper.
—  Say Something by A Great Big World.

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