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Brief
City of York Council wanted a highly innovative road safety campaign to reach 14 - 25 year old road users and pedestrians in York.
Strategy
A Department for Transport (DfT) study suggested that the behaviour of young people is strongly influenced by their need to build and maintain a particular image and identity. So for the message to be effective it needed to be adopted and championed by the audience itself.
Direct Relations created a campaign which used offline tactics including promotional staff, guerrilla marketing, flyers, events, wrist bands, radio and press to drive the target audience to www.madeyoulook.tv and the dedicated FaceBook group.
As our client said, ‘if we can save one life on the roads of York, I’m happy to use whatever tactics will get the message across’.
Execution
Branding
The look and feel of the campaign was essential to get audience impact and acceptance. ‘Made you look’ is derived from a DfT report which identified ‘Failed to look properly’ as the key contributory factor in road accidents. ‘Made you look’ is designed to incorporate .tv to give a clear reference to our use of the digital channel and a website as the call to action. A deliberate decision not to reference City of York Council was made because Councils are perceived as ‘authority’ and as such would create a barrier to communication.
Digital and Social Media Marketing
14 – 25 year olds live a digital life. So, all campaign activity is centred round the website www.madeyoulook.tv
Madeyoulook.tv provides wide appeal and is highly interactive. The site hosts road safety podcasts to engage the audience on their terms. Also including photographs and videos of promotions and stunts used in the campaign, as well as relevant content on road safety with links to Government messages and humorous videos on the same theme. The site is linked in to social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace where groups have been set up. The aim of these groups is for the target audience to add their own images and videos, the audience can then tag themselves which will in turn spread the message of the whole campaign via word of mouth.
To give the podcast appeal and credibility it sandwiches the road safety message between songs performed by local York bands. Local students perform the road safety messages and so add authenticity to the message. The bands provide their music for free in exchange for a link to their own promotional sites. These sites then give a returning link to the main madeyoulook.tv site.
Advertising and Guerrilla Tactics
There are very few poster sites in York, the City actively discourages use of street furniture or any other ‘clutter’. To achieve impact for the campaign, guerrilla marketing tactics were used, including; jet-wash stencilling the branding onto pavements, tying teddy bears and flowers which carry the branding to railings and lampposts in prominent places around the city, plus surprise ‘parking tickets’ which contain leaflets explaining the campaign. Additional support is provided with washroom mirror decals, advertisements inside local busses and local press adverts.
Promotion and Events
To launch the campaign promotional staff on the street got very interactive with the audience, ensuring that they lived up to the campaign theme of ‘Made you look’. They interacted with the message and audience by dressing in fluorescent clothing and handing our fluorescent wrist bands which tied back to the website, photographs were also taken at the event then were added to the social network groups. An event at the York nightclub TRU employed similar tactics, taking the message to the audience in a place where they felt comfortable, allowing word of mouth to get behind the campaign message.
Direct Marketing
The budget precluded traditional postal direct marketing techniques, but digital was both on target and extremely cost effective.
Activity included targeted and segmented Pay Per Click ads on Google and on FaceBook to drive traffic to the website and online groups. The podcast was distributed to Youth Clubs and relevant groups around York, via downloads from laptops as well as distributed by CD’s.
Results
This creatively original and highly impactful integrated campaign successfully ensured that the ‘Made you look’ message related to and was adopted by our key risk audience, driving them to www.madeyoulook.tv and the social networking sites, helping insure that the message of road safety in the City of York was heard and spread effectively.
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