2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Metrolinx
A Billboard A Minute
The average Toronto driver wastes a whopping 8,400 minutes a year driving during rush hour. For commuters, the region is so congested, getting around generally takes 2.8x longer than other major North American cities. GO Transit – a transit system in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area – wanted to improve these commuting conditions, ranked some of the worst in North America.
Objective: get drivers out of their cars and start taking GO Transit instead.
INSIGHTS/STRATEGY
To get drivers to make the switch, BBDO looked to understand the biggest pain point of driving. A segmentation study of the various traveller personas in the region exposed that within the segment defined as by being the most dissatisfied with travel, 76% of their trips are spent driving and 71% claim travelling is a waste of time.
Insight: Travel time in the car is ‘lost time’; a necessary sacrifice to get where you need to be.
Contrasting this with what GO riders loved about their commute – the opportunity to get some work done, browse the internet or just have a nap – it was clear that for those in the know, GO is so much more than just another way to reach your destination: it’s an opportunity to use your time, better.
The agency needed to help drivers see what GO riders already knew… to remind commuters of what they could be doing instead of wasting time stuck in their cars.
Strategy: Demonstrate that with GO, you don’t take time, you make time.
EXECUTION
To express all the things drivers could be doing on transit instead of sitting in their cars, BBDO tapped into a network of digital billboards along busy travel routes that would make GO top of mind in heightened moments of driver drudgery.
The campaign, “A Billboard a Minute”, was comprised of a series of billboard executions that reminded drivers of how they could use their time instead of driving, if they were on GO.
Headlines like “It’s 5:48, you could be knitting a hat, but you’re driving” and “It’s 7:09, you could be proofreading your work, but you’re driving” were all synced to a real-time clock to show that on GO, you could literally be doing anything instead of sitting in traffic.
The shop created a billboard for every minute of the day, so with hundreds of iterations, daily commuters wouldn’t see the same billboard twice, again, reinforcing how much they could be doing with their time in a GO vehicle instead of in their car.
RESULTS
“A Billboard a Minute” earned 86 million impressions, contributing to a record high ridership growth for GO Transit. Whereas 31 of the 35 major transit systems in North America were seeing ridership drops, the campaign helped get millions of new riders on board GO in the months following – a 5.8% increase in riders in the six months following the campaign vs. the same time period year ago.