A British road-safety advert (which cost just £47,000 to make) has been awarded a Gold World Medal at the New York Festival International Advertising Awards- the industry’s equivalent to the Oscars.

More than nine million viewers have watched the minute-and-a-half long video ‘Embrace Life’ on YouTube, which was originally produced for the Sussex Road Safety Partnership upon its January release.

The video’s impact has been astounding- aside from winning a Gold World Medal in the Digital and Interactive category, beating 120 commercials (including the likes of Nike, Starbucks and Chanel), there are now offers from television stations from all over the globe bidding for the rights to broadcast the ad.

The U.S. military service are reportedly interested in using it for training their new recruits, while the likes of Argentina and Australia are hoping to use it for road safety campaigns. But what caused this hullabaloo?

Embrace Life’s message took a different tact to the average road safety video. First, no-one dies. Second, there is no blood or gore. And third, the ‘car crash’ scenario did not take place on the road- but in a living room.

The story revolves around a father, mother and daughter at home, with the father pretending to steer a car on the living room floor as his family watch from their sofa. As the father turns to glance and smiles at his family, his momentary lapse in concentration leads to imminent danger.

As he swerves the imaginary car to avoid the ‘danger’, his daughter rushes towards him and locks her arm around his waist, and his wife corresponds by locking her arms across his upper body. They act as a human seat-belt, and as the crash takes place and a sea of destruction ensues, the family’s seat-belt saves the father from launching through the ‘windscreen’.

The writer and director, Daniel Cox, said the decision to use slow motion in the film had been to allow the audience time to fully absorb the message of the story. “I wanted to create a visual metaphor addressing how a single decision in a person’s day can greatly influence both their own and their loved ones’ lives,” he said.

“Choosing to film the story inside the family living room represents the feelings many people equate with their own car, in that it represents a level of safety and protection from the ‘outer’ world.”

For the producer, Sarah Alexander, the toughest part of the production process was actually allowing the viewing public to take their first glimpse at the finished piece.

She said: “Touching people’s emotions is not a science at all, it is an incredibly difficult thing to do and even after working on it for months you are still not sure how people will react.  

“We always aimed to make something of TV / cinema quality so that is where we launched it. The first time I saw it on a cinema screen in front of an audience of hardened Police officers and realised they were touched, I was sure we had succeeded.”