Case Study: Georgia Tech University

The Georgia Tech students weren’t paying attention. We had them feel the danger. 

Nobody Was Looking.

Georgia Tech’s Environmental Health & Safety office had the protocols in place. What they didn’t have was anyone paying attention. Between assignments, deadlines, and everything else competing for a student’s time, safety messaging was just noise. I was asked to fix that.

To connect with students, I had to understand how they actually spent their time. What their day looked like. When they paid attention to anything, and why.

That’s earned attention. It respects the viewer instead of demanding their time, and it works the same way a good scene in a movie does: honest, relatable, sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous.

My process is elimination. Any concept worth keeping has to land in three seconds or less. Here, that meant exaggerating the danger of skipping PPE in the lab, and matching the tone to how the students themselves already talked, in their language, like a warning label that reads “Best If Used.”

Lab incidents dropped 80 percent. The campaign is still running years after launch. Georgia Tech didn’t need another push. They needed a system that holds without me standing over it.