David Montgomery

dmontgome@argusleader.com

If South Dakota wanted attention, it got it with its brief “Don’t Jerk and Drive” public safety campaign — maybe a little bit more than it wanted.

The deliberate sexual innuendo was supposed to get attention for an important message about the dangers of overcorrecting on icy roads. Instead, state officials say, people mostly seemed to be giggling at the saucy double entendre.

“We’re not so sure this maybe resonated with everyone the way it was intended,” said Trevor Jones, the secretary of Public Safety who pulled the plug on the ad campaign Thursday. “Is the primary message getting through? If the innuendo is the primary message, I think the ad has kind of failed.”

Marketing experts aren’t so sure. It’s possible that the innuendo really was getting the message through to hard-to-reach young male drivers.

“The dollar amount they’ve spent on advertising by far has been far outstripped by (free attention),” said Rand Wergin, a marketing professor at the University of South Dakota. “The campaign was, from what I can tell, effective in reaching the goals of the campaign, which is awareness. Now you can talk to people and they will know you don’t need to jerk the wheel.”

That was definitely the goal. The salacious reference absolutely was intentional.

“We are adamant in our pursuit of campaigns that break through the clutter in a crowded media landscape to a target an audience that’s difficult to reach,” said Micah Aberson, a strategist with Lawrence & Schiller who helped craft the campaign, before the state canned it.

Public relations expert Paul Maccabee said South Dakota might have miscalculated in its embrace of a risqué campaign.

“There are people and products where people expect them to be transgressive, and that’s part of the brand,” Maccabee said, pointing to commercials for beer and energy drinks. But people don’t expect that edginess from highway safety commercials, he said.

There’s also a difference between awareness and changing behavior.

“You can show a naked woman in a TV spot and people will talk about it,” said Maccabee, president of Maccabee Public Relations. “The question is, will you change behavior? That’s a totally different story from ‘Will you notice them and will you talk about them?’ ”

Though “Don’t Jerk and Drive” raised eyebrows when it first ran, Jones didn’t cancel it right away. The campaign ran for more than a week and showed some impressive results: unusually high online traffic that outperformed past campaigns 25 to 1.

The end came after the Argus Leader, followed by other media outlets, reported Thursday about the double entendre in the “Don’t Jerk” campaign.

“When the innuendo became the story, and not the primary message, that’s when the decision (was made that) we’d be better off maybe moving on to a different message,” Jones said.

Though the state received “a few complaints” from citizens, Jones said that wasn’t what caused him to cancel the ads. Nor, he said, was pressure from legislators, though a high-ranking legislator was upset by the campaign and planning on holding a hearing on the subject next year.

It also apparently wasn’t pressure from above. Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s chief of staff Tony Venhuizen said Daugaard hadn’t paid much attention to the campaign and didn’t push to end it.

“I could certainly see why there would be concerns, but he also felt that the point the campaign was trying to make is an important one,” Venhuizen said.

Wergin said people shouldn’t make too big a deal about canceling “Don’t Jerk and Drive.”

“A campaign like that has a pretty short lifespan anyways,” Wergin said. “It may have been a savvy move to drop the campaign quickly... Now people are talking about that.”

“Don’t Jerk and Drive” wasn’t the first ad campaign to turn heads with saucy innuendo. Staid retailer Kmart made a mark last year with its “Ship my pants” campaign. And the Minnesota Department of Health drew attention with a series of billboards using pictures of bare butts to urge men to get colonoscopies.