GForce Grey and inlab turn inDrive rides into a tool to tackle bullying in Kazakhstan

Most parents think they know where their child is going every morning: to school. But for many kids, school is also where fear lives, bullying, anxiety and silence. And the hardest part isn’t caring, it’s knowing how to ask.

Every morning, inDrive completes around 20,000 rides to schools. Parents sit in the back seat next to their kids, but most of the time, they don’t talk. They scroll, check messages and wait for the ride to end.

The brand saw something else in that routine: a rare moment when parent and child are side by side, alone, without distractions.

What many treat as dead time became an opportunity to notice something important. Because the most serious cases of bullying don’t start with violence, they start with silence.

As Forbes Kazakhstan noted, the brand “pulls parents out of their routine and confronts them with an unsettling reality.”

So instead of treating the ride as just another trip, inDrive turned it into something more. In partnership with GForce Grey and inlab, the brand launched “Cancel the School Ride?” in Kazakhstan.

A simple idea built into the product itself.

When a ride to school is ordered, the app changes.

Parents on their way to school receive a push notification they don’t expect from a ride-hailing app: “Cancel the School Ride?”

It interrupts the routine of the ride and invites immediate attention at exactly the moment it matters most.

Inside the app, they receive practical guidance developed with child psychologists:
• How to start the conversation without pressure.
• What questions to ask.
• What not to say.

A real-time guide for one of the hardest conversations a parent can have.

And one that does not need to end when the car stops — once it begins, it can continue anywhere, in any moment that feels right.

Because sometimes the barrier is not willingness. It’s fear of saying the wrong thing. So they tried to remove that fear by making the first step easier.

Then adding something no ride-hailing app has offered before:
• a way out. a button. a decision.
• Cancel the School Ride?

One tap and the destination changes.
From school to a place where support can begin.
From silence to attention.

Because inDrive has access to something few brands do:
• The back seat — a space where people are physically close, but often emotionally distant.
• A space no one else can enter in quite the same way.
• As Harper’s Bazaar Kazakhstan wrote, inDrive “uses its actual user journey as a point of intervention and dialogue.”

To bring that idea into the real world, GForce Grey and inlab introduced the Green Back Seat — first inside inDrive cars, then as public installations across Almaty. Supported by a landing page, in-app banners, influencer content, PR, and integrations with platforms like Kundelik, the campaign carried one clear message: every place can be the right place to start a difficult conversation. What matters is starting it.

The result was a service that, as ELLE Kazakhstan observed, “moved beyond its utilitarian function.” With “Cancel the School Ride?”, inDrive turned the one moment it truly owns — the ride itself — into a chance to notice, to talk, and to act.

Credits
Client: inDrive
Agencies: GForce Grey, inlab
inDrive team:
Senior Brand Director – Mikhail Chernyshev
Marketing Director EMEA & APAC – Anna Migal
Marketing Lead KZ – Aleksei Pontus
Head of Non-violence Program – Anna Rivina
Head of Sustainability Marketing – Irina Shubina
Growth Program Manager – Dana Gabbas
Communications Team Leader EMEA – Sergey Avakyan-Rzhevskiy
Communications Manager – Aigul Aliyassova
Regional Content Marketing Manager – Temirlan Yermekov
Influencer Marketing Manager CIS – Tomiris Kopbayeva
Senior Media Manager – Olga Golubok
CRM and Product Marketing Director – Aleksey Kurdup
Product Marketing Team Leader EMEA – Aleksei Chirkov
Product Marketing Manager – Anna Chobanian
inlab team:
Creative Team Leader EMEA – Eugene Gavrilchenko
Marketing Communications Manager – Alina Shadrina-Stepanova
Marketing Localization Manager – Polina Karabalaeva
Senior Designer – Anastasia Zimina
Senior Digital Producer – Ivan Loktev
Digital Producer – Nataliya Bogdanova
Digital Producer – Daniyar Tabyldiyev
Production Producer – Xeniya Andreyenko
GForce Grey team:
Chief Creative Excellence Officer – Yuliya Tushina
Executive Creative Director – Yevgeniy Kostylev
Creative Group Head –Victor Yershov
Creative Group Head –Diana Moldagulova
Client Service Director –Anastasiya Ivanova
Account Manager –Veronika Sorokovskaya
Motion Designer – Alexander Filatov
Consulting Psychologist – Ksenia Lych
Landing Page Design & Development – DIGITAL BUTLERS agency