The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022
Vodacom's Waze ads reroute drivers around hijack hotspots — Loeries 2022 winner
Vodacom turned Waze ad space into live safety warnings: geo-fenced alerts tell drivers they're approaching a hijack hotspot and reroute them — Loeries 2022.
Vodacom
What it had to solve
South Africa's roads are among the world's most dangerous for hijacking, with over 30,000 incidents a year. About 800,000 South African drivers use Waze, but it calculates the fastest route, not the safest one — guiding drivers straight through crime hotspots.
How it works
South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of car hijacking — more than 30,000 incidents reported in a year — and the worst of it concentrates on roads around major cities. Around 800,000 South African drivers use the navigation app Waze, but Waze calculates the fastest route, not the safest one, so drivers were being guided straight through the country's most dangerous intersections.
Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile operator, had the data to do something about it. With VMLY&R South Africa, it cross-referenced national police crime data, car-tracker records and historical reports to map where hijackings concentrate. The team then geo-fenced Waze ad placements around those hotspots: as a driver approaches a dangerous stretch, the ad activates, warns of the danger ahead and offers a reroute that still reaches the same destination.
The system improved itself in real time — as new hijack zones were reported, live ads were deployed to those roads and to high-risk times of day. Vodacom never sold a data plan in the campaign; instead it demonstrated what its network and data could do about a customer's most basic fear. The work won at the 2022 Loeries Awards and a D&AD award, and became the standard reference for using navigation data as a public-safety medium.
Why it lands
- It solved a real, visceral fear — hijacking — instead of interrupting people with a product pitch.
- The medium was the message: Waze was already in drivers' hands, so the warning appeared exactly where the risk was.
- Mashing up police, car-tracker and historical data produced a live map that street signs could never match.
- Because only Vodacom's own network and data made the service possible, the idea was hard for rivals to copy cheaply.
What it did
The work won at the 2022 Loeries Awards and earned a D&AD award; in a country where about 800,000 drivers use Waze and hijackings exceed 30,000 a year, it became the reference case for turning navigation ads into live crime warnings.
What you can take
Sell safety, not speed: instead of a product pitch, Vodacom used the app customers already trust and its own data to solve a daily fear — generosity with data beats advertising claims.
Since then
Anti-Hijack Ads was part of VMLY&R South Africa's seven-award haul at the 2022 Loeries Awards and sits in the D&AD archive as an award-winning reference for geo-data-driven advertising. It became a widely cited example of a brand using its own capabilities as a public service — ad inventory converted into live safety warnings.
Sources
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