Category: Titanium and Integrated
Advertiser: CROSSCOUNTRY
Product/Service: CROSSCOUNTRY TRAINS
Agency: McCANN MANCHESTER
Date of First Appearance: Oct 4 2010
Art Director: Parisa Shadi (McCann Manchester)
Copywriter: Neale Denaro (McCann Manchester)
Copywriter: Dawn Hoskinson (McCann Manchester)
Executive Creative Director: Dave Price (McCann Manchester)
Creative Director: Neil Lancaster (McCann Manchester)
Media placement: Facebook Competition - Facebook - 11th October 2010
Media placement: Virals - Email, Facebook - 11th October 2010
Media placement: Clean Graffiti Ambient - Pavements - 11th October 2010
Media placement: Out of Home Poster - Ad-Shells - 3rd February 2011
Describe the campaign/entry
Students – a potentially big audience for train tickets. Those dirty clothes won’t get home on their own.
But they’re an audience with little spare change. Especially after a big night out. So CrossCountry offered them a special discount. Unfortunately, they’re not exactly known for paying much attention. So how did we get the message across?
We created a campaign with virtually no branding or mention of trains. Just a URL to our Facebook page. Here, students could shop their cheapskate mates to win prizes and see something else really cheap – train tickets from CrossCountry.
Describe how the campaign/entry was launched across each channel in the order of implementation
First we rolled out a clean graffiti campaign across universities. Then we created a series of viral videos and distributed them to bloggers.
The URL on these pieces sent them to the Facebook page, where they could find a competition. We asked students to upload stories of their cheapskate mates and vote for the best.
The page had subtle branding of CrossCountry, showing how their train tickets were just as cheap as the entrants. A final burst of posters hammered home this message.
Give some idea of how successful this campaign/entry was with both client and consumer
Our multi-channel Cheapskate mate campaign hit a large number of students on a national level and through social media and PR alone we reached a total online audience of over 6 million people. As a result, this campaign increased traffic to the CrossCountry NUS site by over 60%, with revenue increasing by over 40%.