Knowing discrimination was rife in the taxi industry, and that Hailo are a company of the people, for the people, representing all walks of life, with a strong social conscience, we saw an opportunity for them to take a stand and support a side. The Yes side.

Playing on the preconception that drivers were outspoken, opinionated and discriminatory, we flipped the debate on its head creating a ‘Heterophobic’ Taxi driver to show passengers how ridiculous all forms of discrimination are.

We unleashed our Hetrophobic taxi driver on the commuters of Dublin in a cab fitted with hidden cameras. Casting was vital; the driver’s credibility making or breaking the video and so we chose a real driver with loads of personality, gave him a few scripted lines and a live linkup to our writer who fed him improvised gags to bring his Hetrophobic opinions to life.

Timing was essential too. We released the video through Hailo’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter & YouTube) just 3 days before the referendum, appearing just as a mainstream media moratorium on the issue was implemented. This gave us maximum ‘loudness of voice’ at the time to both lighten tension around the heated debate and get our “all discrimination is ridiculous, get out and vote Yes” message across.

Total organic video views of 908,753

Hailo Usage:

- New users up 30%

- Daily active users grew 26%

- Revenue increased 26%

- Churn dropped from 5.5% to 2.5%

- Pre-books up 800%

- YouTube views 231,802

Facebook:

- Organic views 648,302

- 1,223,168 reach

- 26,147 Likes

- 3,756 comments

- 8,618 shares

- 275,717 post clicks

Twitter:

#driverforequality trended in Ireland the week of the vote

- 4,800 replies to #driveforequality posts

- 478,907 impressions, 63,793 organic

- 28,649 views, 10,799 organic

- 1,693 favourites

- 1,689 retweets

- 141 new twitter followers

- 184 hashtag clicks

- 1.3m estimated reach

- Posted by Graham Norton (1.1m followers), Dara O’Briain (2.2m) and George Takei (1.8m)

Coverage:

- 45 local press

- 11 international press coverage

- Featured on UK “Trust Me IT’s News” and “RudeTube” TV with reach 560,000

- Potential impressions in earned editorial coverage 22,194,234