Ad Nauseam

LADOT P.S.A. – Same Crash, Different Perspective

So, a lot of you didn't like the Emmy Award Winning P.S.A. put out by LADOT in 2008 which showed a young girl getting hit by a speeding car because it put too much of the blame on the girl and not enough on the driver. I thought it was a powerful piece, maybe because as an expectant father any image of a child being mauled by a vehicle is going to get my attention, and many commenters thought it was a missed opportunity to make a point about dangerous driving.

By Damien Newton

8:15 AM PDT on September 1, 2009

So, a lot of you didn’t like the Emmy Award Winning P.S.A. put out by LADOT in 2008 which showed a young girl getting hit by a speeding car because it put too much of the blame on the girl and not enough on the driver. I thought it was a powerful piece, maybe because as an expectant father any image of a child being mauled by a vehicle is going to get my attention, and many commenters thought it was a missed opportunity to make a point about dangerous driving.

Fair enough.

But to be fair to LADOT, yesterday I was only covering the advertisement that won the Emmy. Above, is a companion announcement focusing only on the driver’s role in the crash. If I were an Emmy voter, I would have voted for yesterday’s featured ad over this one because the voice-over from the driver in today’s sounds a little off to me:

My God! How did this happen? As a child, I was always in a hurry. As I got older, I was always distracted. And in the next second, I’ll kill a little girl.

Then, the same film of a young girl in a pink soccer uniform getting slammed into by the driver is shown before the voice changes to another man, presumably one of the police on the scene.