On the walls of elevators, the floor of the commons, the fronts of laptops and the sides of water bottles—you can’t escape them. The sight of them brings about more questions than answers, more chuckles than understanding and a strong desire to place them on all of your possessions.
Founded in 2013, Running Against Driving Drunk (RADD) is a sticker advertising campaign discouraging drunk driving and unsafe behavior while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. However, RADD’s approach is intentionally offbeat. While other anti-drunk driving campaigns use fear tactics that condemn partying and drug use, RADD uses memes.
“The founding principle is memorability,” said Jackson Stewart, RADD’s founder. “Most drunk driving cases are from going over the top and other party drug interactions. We treat people as if they like to party and they have learned that driving drunk is harmful.”
Stewart’s business partner and Denver representative for RADD added, “We are trying to get the reminder out there in a sensible fashion to party culture and college age. We do it in a memorable way with South Park and bar humor. The popularity of the images draw people in and the good thing is each sticker on the bottom says “Against Driving Drunk.”
If you are hearing about these stickers for the first time, you likely haven’t been in on-campus housing or to businesses nearby. RADD partners with restaurants, liquor stores, smoke shops and cafes who hand out the stickers for free; they just restock them every 4-6 weeks. These establishments are chosen for their close proximity to college campuses. They work with RADD because they are where college students and party-goers frequent often, and who doesn’t love free stickers?
In 2014, the campaign spread to Colorado first at CU Boulder, where Stewart transferred after two years at the University of Washington. “I started doing Denver downtown in 2016. I met Sherman there, and we vibed, so to speak. We have been building it since,” Stewart said.
Stewart began RADD after he suffered a drunk driving car wreck in 2011 where he found himself in a coma for 21 days. After, at the University of Washington (UW) he began RADD as a registered student organization (RSO). However, he found that his RSO was treated as a joke by the university, and students would graduate and lose steam for the cause. Now, RADD is fully private, partnered with no universities and made up of a small team throughout Arizona, Colorado, and Washington.
“We do most of the distribution. The best teams are smaller and hard-working and have the drive for it” says Stewart.
Looking ahead, the goal is to get RADD ads on the sides of beer boxes, hoping to have an increasingly effective means of reminding party-goers to look after one another and stay safe while still having fun.
