The Text & Drive Challenge: A Game That Lets You Crash to Prove a Point
India sees 5 lakh road accidents and 1.5 lakh deaths every year, many from distracted driving. ibs Fulcro built Drive of Fortune, a mobile game for Zurich Kotak General Insurance that offers players a real cash prize for answering questions while driving, then lets their own distraction cause the crash the campaign was warning about.
At a glance
Client: Zurich Kotak General Insurance (Insurance)
Problem: Distracted driving contributes to a real, large share of India's 5 lakh annual road accidents, but the risk feels abstract until it's demonstrated directly.
Solution: The Text & Drive Challenge, a real mobile game offering a genuine cash prize for answering questions while 'driving,' letting the player's own distraction cause the crash the campaign warns about.
Result: Visitors: 2,80,000+
ibs Fulcro's role: Gamified Campaign
The Marketing Challenge
India records around 5 lakh road accidents and 1.5 lakh fatalities every year, figures independently confirmed by Nitin Gadkari, India's Minister of Road Transportation, in a televised interview, and corroborated by real, dated press coverage from outlets including the World Resources Institute, Mint, and Zee News, each separately reporting India's road safety record among the worst in the world. Despite that scale, awareness of one specific, avoidable cause, distracted driving, remains limited.
The real challenge wasn't the statistics themselves. It was creating digital content compelling enough to actually capture an audience's attention and educate them on a topic most people assume doesn't apply to them personally.
The Objective
Drive Zurich Kotak General Insurance's reputation as a genuine, credible influencer in promoting road safety, not just a company running a corporate social responsibility message alongside its actual business.
The Idea: Drive of Fortune
ibs Fulcro built a mobile-first campaign using gamification to make the dangers of distracted driving genuinely felt, not just stated. The Drive of Fortune challenge, hosted at driveoffortune.com, asked users to control the steering wheel of a vehicle on their phone and answer three questions to claim a cash prize of up to ₹1 lakh.
The mechanic itself was the entire point: while a player was answering a question, their attention, quite literally, left the road. That same distracted behaviour eventually caused a car accident inside the game. The scene was built to emphasise the deadly real-world risk of texting while driving, closing on a simple, direct line: no reward is worth more than life.
Why letting players cause their own crash mattered more than showing them one: a road safety film can tell an audience texting while driving is dangerous. A game that offers a real cash incentive, then uses that same incentive to make the player's own attention drift exactly the way it would on a real road, makes the point experientially rather than didactically. Players didn't watch someone else make the mistake. They made it themselves, for a prize that felt real, which is precisely why the message landed.
How the Game Actually Worked
| Step | What Happened |
|---|---|
| Entry | Players opened driveoffortune.com on their phone and were invited to steer a vehicle for a chance at up to ₹1 lakh |
| Driving | The player controlled the car's steering directly on their phone, in a first-person driving view |
| The distraction | Three questions appeared on a second, in-game phone screen; answering correctly required looking away from the road |
| The consequence | Answering while driving caused the same real-world distraction dynamic to play out, and the vehicle crashed |
| The message | The game closed on the line that no reward is worth more than life, reframing the crash as the actual lesson, not a game-over screen |
Source: campaign video, ibs Fulcro / Zurich Kotak General Insurance.
The Results
The campaign drew more than 2,80,000 visitors to the experience and generated more than 175,000 individual game plays, both strong indicators that the mobile-first, gamified approach succeeded in capturing attention in a category, road safety messaging, that's typically easy to scroll past. The experience was shared more than 25,000 times, extending its reach well beyond paid distribution alone.
Why game plays is the number that proves the concept worked, not just the traffic. Visitors measure how many people showed up. Game plays measure how many people actually engaged with the mechanic, drove the car, answered the questions, and experienced the crash the campaign was built around. A high play-through rate relative to visitors is direct evidence the experience delivered its message to the people it reached, rather than being abandoned before the point landed.
Why This Matters Beyond One Campaign
The underlying idea here is a genuinely transferable one for any brand purpose campaign built around a behaviour people already know is risky but underestimate in themselves: don't just tell the audience what could happen, put them in the exact situation that causes it, using the same psychological pull, a reward worth chasing, that causes the real-world behaviour in the first place. A warning is easy to dismiss. An experience that makes someone briefly do the risky thing themselves, for a prize they actually wanted, is much harder to shrug off.
Frequently asked questions
A road safety campaign by Zurich Kotak General Insurance, built by ibs Fulcro, centred on Drive of Fortune, a mobile game that offered players a cash prize of up to ₹1 lakh for steering a car and answering questions, then used the resulting distraction to cause an in-game crash, demonstrating the real danger of texting while driving.
A traditional ad tells an audience distracted driving is dangerous. The game let players experience the exact distraction dynamic themselves, chasing a real cash prize, which made the resulting in-game crash a far more personal and memorable lesson than a warning alone.
India records approximately 5 lakh road accidents and 1.5 lakh fatalities annually, figures confirmed on screen in the campaign by Nitin Gadkari, India's Minister of Road Transportation, and corroborated by independent press coverage from the World Resources Institute, Mint, and Zee News on India's road safety record.
Players visited driveoffortune.com on their phone, controlled a car's steering, and answered three questions to try to win a cash prize of up to ₹1 lakh. Answering the questions required looking away from the road, and that same distraction caused a crash inside the game, closing on the message that no reward is worth more than life.
The campaign drew more than 2,80,000 visitors, generated more than 175,000 game plays, and was shared more than 25,000 times.
To establish Zurich Kotak General Insurance's reputation as a genuine, credible influencer in promoting road safety, rather than a company attaching its name to a cause separately from its core business.