Case Study: Transport for London – Do The Test
In March 2008 WCRS, part of the Engine Group, developed for Transport for London the campaign Do The Test, designed to promote and increase road safety to cyclists & drivers.
The campaign centred on an ad, which challenged viewers to count the number of passes made by one of two teams of basketball players. However after all the passes had been made, the viewer was challenged as to whether they had noticed something unrelated to the basketball, highlighting how easy it is to miss things when one’s attention is elsewhere.
Altogether Digital, responsible for the seeding & online marketing, was asked to devise an online strategy to reach out to the target audience of people, who might either drive or cycle in the Greater London area.
Below you can find the campaign approach and the results.
Campaign Approach
The main aim of the campaign was to ensure that the ad was seen online by as many people in the target area as possible. With a simple one‐page site constructed at Dothetest.co.uk, the URL of which was promoted at the end of the TV ad.
Altogether Digital devised a two‐stage strategy, to seed the video:
- Seed the video to blogs & forums for cycling enthusiasts.
- Seed the video to more general interest blogs, forums & video‐sharing sites
The reason for this two‐stage strategy was that, although the client was concerned to
only talk to drivers & cyclists, the majority of people who drive or cycle in London do not
participate in specialist forums online. Altogether Digital therefore felt that by taking the message out to a wider audience, it would filter back to the people it most concerned.
With this strategy in mind, the London-based digital marketing agency then set about implementing it in a number of different ways:
- Ensure that the content was ’sharable’; this was done by insisting that social bookmarking ‘chicklets’ were incorporated into the design of dothetest.co.uk and that the YouTube ‘embed’ code was built into the design of the page, to make it as easy as possible for people to copy the video on to their own blogs & websites
- Creating profiles in video‐sharing sites which were the most likely to provide the largest possible target audiences, from their experience with similar campaigns. These profiles were ‘optimised’ so as to give the video the best possible chance of being seen by large numbers of viewers
- Analysis & research of blogs & forums for cycling enthusiasts
- Building relationships with these blogs and forums and explaining the purpose of the campaign
- Submission to popular social bookmarking sites, such as digg, and use existing networks to promote the video on these sites
- After the campaign had been running for long enough and met expectations, the hosting of the video at dothetest.co.uk was stopped and replaced with the embedded YouTube player. Any traffic directed to dothetest.co.uk now also counted as a view at YouTube, kick‐starting the video’s popularity on that site again
The strategy was in many ways a mixture of social media optimisation (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM). Social media optimisation is the technical art of ensuring that content can easily be shared and talked about; Social media marketing is the actual task of starting and spreading that conversation. This led to great success for Do The Test.
Copyright Complaint
The ‘Do the test’ video received a copyright complaint and was shortly removed from YouTube, due to the fact that the idea was first filmed in 1999 by Professor Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois. However, the copyright issue was quickly resolved and the advert was soon back on YouTube. But created initial buzz and attention.
A WCRS spokesperson about the matter to Brand Republic: “We are facing criticism relating to copyright on the cycling safety TV ad. We have been assured that this execution does not infringe copyright. We feel it is a powerful message and is one that will have an impact on this very serious issue.”
Professor Simons: “From what little I understand about British copyright law, the advertisement was probably within the letter of the law given that they made some minor changes from my version (e.g, 8 players rather than 6, a bear suit rather than a gorilla suit). In any case, I’m not interested in pursuing a legal or publicity fight with an ad agency or with the British government.”
Campaign Results
The results of the campaign were beyond the clients expectations and that of Altogether Digital. Within 1 month of the campaign’s launch, the Awareness Test video had achieved in the region of 5.5 million views, against a target of around 150,000.
This success was in itself made up of a number of individual milestones:
- 4th most popular video in the world on Video Viral Chart (week ending 27th March)
- March 19th & 20th, 2nd most blogged video in the world
- 3.7 million views from video‐sharing sites
- Most viewed video in its YouTube category in the UK for March
- 3rd top rated video in its YouTube category in the UK of all time
- Sent on to 23,290 people using the ‘Send to a friend’ link on dothetest.co.uk
- 1.5 million views from social bookmarking & social news aggregator sites & Page 1 on digg & reddit
- 32,359 clicks through to the main Transport for London site
- 5,092 views from specialist cycling blogs & forums
- Emailed to a specialist mailing list of 16,000 addresses
The advert, which ends with the title ‘It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. Look out for cyclists’, was awared a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions 2008 in the category Public Health & Safety.
Credits
Title: Awareness test
Advertiser: Transport for london
Product/Service: Cycle safety
Advertising Agency: WCRS, London
Creative Director: Yan Elliott/Luke Williamson
Copywriter: Tom Spicer/Simon Aldridge
Art Director: Kit Dayaram/Vince Chasteuneuf
Agency Producer: James Letham
Account Supervisor: Fergus Adam
Production Company: Gorgeous Enterprises, London
Producer: Rupert Symthe
Director: Chris Palmer
D.O.P/Lighting Cameraman: Ben Seresin
Editor: Paul Watts
Sound Design/Arrangement: Wave
Post Production: Glassworks
Planner: Giselle Okin
Online Marketing & Seeding: Altogether Digital
Start Date:10th March 2008
Expenditure: £250k
Exposure: 60sec TV London only, Press, online
Many thanks to Ciarán Norris, SEO & Social Media Director, at Altogether Digital, and Laurence Parkes, Head of Digital Strategy at WCRS, for sharing this case study!
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Awesome post!!
And I must admit, I had missed the moonwalking bear as well the first time
Cheers
Igor
this is a great example of how to effectively make a point and convey messages! awesome