VIA Rail Canada
Data vs Car

The Goal

Steeling transportation shares from cars is a huge challenge. The brand didn’t have to convince people to adopt its company, but to change their transportation habits.

The brand built a media ecosystem based on real-time traffic feed, to warn, prove, and convince people to take the train at the right moment. To do so it leveraged data to follow drivers along their transportation journey. Once it collected the info, the agency segmented and merged them to create real-time feed.

The Target

In the markets covered by VIA Rail, Canada's national rail passenger service, the car is the fastest option when the road conditions are ideal. Most of the time however, when traffic and bad weather get in the way, the train becomes the best solution. When consumers plan a trip from point A to point B, their primary concern is to have the shortest travel time. This is a global truth, but it is especially powerful in Canada because its vast territories can make travel time even longer. Because of their unconditional love of cars, drivers tend to be overly optimistic about how long it actually takes to get somewhere by car, failing to factor real-time road conditions into their calculations.

Insights and Strategy

Almost 25% of people classify the traffic as a stress component in their real life (anger and aggressiveness can actually become real symptoms following a bad-traffic-experience); it seemed accurate for the brand to transform this insight into an opportunity. Consumers needed to be convinced by real-time information at the moment it mattered the most.

Like initiating the conversation when people were going to travel a long distance, showing them that their projected arrival time was longer than expected as they are driving down a busy highway or reminding them how bad was their travel to their final destination shortly after they arrived.

The challenge was to provide drivers with real-time traffic information on each of the 16 stretches of highways covered by VIA Rail. At any given point in time, the message was customized to each consumer. It took into consideration their current geo-position, their predicted end destination and real-time traffic and weather data.

The Plan

Before: The agency identified drivers about to travel by targeting those who looked up for weather or traffic information for a destination outside their home town with digital banners and SEM communicating real-time travel times for car versus train.

During: With digital out-of-home, the team covered all of the major highways between Quebec City and Toronto. The message was adapted in real-time, displaying the estimated arrival time based on the location of each sign and current traffic conditions. Because it was based on the geo-location of each board, the message was always customized.

After: The agency leveraged our out-of-home partnership to collect all the mobile device IDs of drivers exposed to the advertising as well as drivers who were stuck in traffic jams. The team then re-targeted these drivers as they arrived at their destination, displaying a personalized message that reminded them of the frustration of being stuck in traffic and the benefits of taking the train.

The Results

VIA Rail succeed at stealing shares to what seemed an unbeatable competition: car! Train ridership rose by 11.7% year-over-year, and revenues increased by 13.9%, to the expense of cars.

All of the media tactics greatly outperformed the usual standards. Contextualized messages generated click rates that were 95% higher than all of our display and mobile campaigns, and they helped increase the conversion rate by 14% on VIA Rail's booking engine.
Finally, over 1.5 million unique mobile device IDs were collected in the DMP, increasing the volume of audiences the brand can activate in its always-on campaigns. The campaign was recognised internationally with a silver in the “travel” category and a bronze in the “use of real time data” category at Cannes Festival of Creativity 2018. The campaign was also awarded Campaign of the Year at Festival of Media Global 2018 with three golds. Finally, the campaign won 3 Grand-Prix at Prix Média Infopresse in Montreal.