Gex said:

This shit pisses me off sometimes. It is like those meth commercials that I saw for months straight, gory as hell. Did it fix the problem? No it just cost the state thousands of dollars to waste my time and attempt to turn my stomach instead of spending it on education.

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The case study explored how a £8.68 million pound investment in DOE road safety advertising over a nine-year period had made a significant contribution to saving lives and protecting the public from injury on the roads as well as the economic benefits for the community.

The evidence highlighted the 2774 lives saved from death and serious injury from the period 1995 to 2003 with the TV advertising campaigns emerging as the most influential factor in changing public attitudes and behavioural shifts.

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Examining the Effectiveness of Physical Threats in Road Safety Advertising: The Role of the Third-Person Effect, Gender, and Age1

Abstract
...Threatening advertisements have been widely used in the social marketing of road safety. However, despite their popularity and over five decades of research into the fear-persuasion relationship, an unequivocal answer regarding their effectiveness remains unachieved...
...Results indicated a significant gender difference with females reporting reverse third-person effects (i.e., the messages would have more influence on themselves than others) and males reporting classic third-person effects (i.e., the messages would have more influence on others than themselves)...

Introduction
...Surprisingly, despite the frequency with which threat appeals are utilised in health advertising, a substantial body of literature spanning over five decades attests to contradictory findings regarding the manner in which fear is related to persuasion...
...According to this view, increasing the level of fear induced would increase message persuasiveness up until some critical point at which, once exceeded, the level of fear becomes excessive, resulting in avoidance and rejection of the message(Janis, 1967; Quinn, Meenaghan, & Brannick 1992; Ray and Wilkie, 1970). Some empirical support exists for the curvilinear view with studies indicating that fear is positively associated with both message acceptance and message rejection (Lewis, 2002; Tay & Watson, 2002). Arguably, such findings highlight the particularly ambiguous nature of the fear-persuasion relationship...

Discussion
...Our results also highlight the fact that although males represent a major high-risk group for road trauma (Tay, 1999; 2002), it appears that they are being less persuaded than females by current threat-based advertisements that incorporate threats of physical harm/injury. Thus, it follows that identifying the most effective threat type for male drivers remains a key task for future research pursuits...

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They did not even use a control group...Anyways I am a male and I will accept the fact that advertisements do not work on me

Good find on the article but for you knowledge I was mostly pissed off about the work safety ads.