London has suffered illegal levels of air pollution since 2010 and on some measures is worse than New Delhi and Beijing.

To combat this Mayor Sadiq Khan has championed the hugely controversial ULEZ. While many support it, the backlash has been significant with demonstrations against the £24 charge by taxi drivers and small business owners gaining national media coverage.

Electric vehicles are exempt so we knew most car marques would be talking about their electric range during the launch of ULEZ.

We needed to raise awareness of the Renault Zoe amongst Londoners in a way that would rise above the noise.

Our social listening team found a huge uptick in negative sentiment about ULEZ.

We took advantage of this negative sentiment, and turned it into something more positive.

Under the campaign line “Keep it Clean” we set out to help clean up London’s air and twitter too.

Based on a lexicon of over 200 swear words we built an algorithm which pulled in live tweets from angry drivers. And parked a Zoe over the offending swear words.

These ‘cleaner’ tweets were then served up to digital OOH sites on all London’s major roads – targeting drivers on their daily commute.

We also contacted some of the angry tweeters and asked them to talk about their ULEZ frustrations.

We turned these conversations into radio commercials, “bleeping” out each swear word with a “Renault Zoe” audio mnemonic.

Again, spots were bought during drive time on all of London’s major radio stations.

The purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness amongst people who drive into London, now more receptive to electric vehicles thanks to the ULEZ charge.

However, we knew most car brands would be shouting about their products. So we decided to do something different. Listen.

We set up a lexicon of over 200 swear words and created an algorithm that trawled Twitter for ULEZ frustrations geotagged to London.

A Renault Zoe was digitally ‘parked’ over offending swear words and served to media platforms.

By hijacking the conversation going in the real-world drivers began to target our poster sites – sending filthy tweets so they’d get cleaned up and appear around London.

This enabled us to gather the data of even more prospects. And each was contacted with the offer of a test drive.

We even used the data to contact Londoners

We began gathering data to build the campaign assets in mid March and digital OOH ran in nearly 100 sites on all of the major roads leading into central London from the launch of ULEZ on April 8th. The campaign finished on the 3rd of May.

As the live data gathered momentum, it was served out to geotargeted high-impact Newsbrand placements and Automotive online titles.

And some of our star tweeters were recorded venting their ULEZ frustrations making guest appearances in radio spots which played out on London’s top seven commercial stations during drive time.

Simultaneously prospect data was harvested and each participant in the campaign was offered a test drive.

By targeting car owners in specific parts of London affected by ULEZ, we were able to gain maximum impact on a limited budget, achieving added value of 30%.

The campaign managed to achieve mass awareness despite its targeted nature. The cultural impact of the campaign was undeniable. Not only was the campaign picked up by industry publications, we achieved 46,000 views over the benchmark in advertorial.

It was so successful that an activation that was only supposed to run for 2 days became a month-long campaign, achieving reach of 23,632,900 impacts.

This all resulted in real end-of-the-funnel purchase benefits for Renault, with a 20% uplift in searches on WhatCar?, an increase in traffic by over 25% and a 50% increase in traffic quality on site visits over the course of the campaign.