Uber had been selling train tickets through its app since 2022 - but hardly anyone had been buying them. Why would they, when Uber was for booking cars - and they were happy booking trains elsewhere?

Despite sending over 25 direct email comms to Uber users, awareness of Trains floundered at just 8% and was the biggest barrier to growth. Amongst the general population, awareness was even lower. The brief was to drastically increase these numbers. Starting with a launch in London.

Our media analysis showed that Uber’s priority audience, Uber app users in London, over-index hugely on OOH consumption (i170). Combined with the fact that over 60% of Londoners have seen an OOH advert in a train station within the last week, we focussed our targeting to the train station environment.

Uber and trains were two different worlds. Uber was famous for cars that were private and spontaneous, whereas trains were public and planned. So it’s no surprise that the only Tweets we could find about train tickets on Uber either quizzical [You can buy train tickets on Uber now??] or critical [You can now buy train tickets on Uber 🥴] (drunk face emoji).

Whilst using Uber to book trains felt odd, social psychology shows that introducing a new, unfamiliar idea is easier when you build on existing, familiar references. So, as much as Uber’s associations were a weakness, its established language, iconography and behaviours were also a strength.

So, we created a campaign introducing the unfamiliar world of trains through the familiar world of Uber.

To maximise our budget, we focused on London due to the high volume of footfall through the major stations and higher propensity to use train travel v the rest of the country.

Our media strategy was to target travellers coming in and out of London, not using contactless payments or travelcards. Aged 18-50, to overlap with Uber’s key growth audiences.

We aimed to increase awareness of train booking on Uber, by capturing attention in existing train journeys. Announcing our campaign in an unmissable way at train stations, whilst disrupting via other channels along the journey.

Station OOH was our lead channel: London stations are key to capturing the attention of trains users. We set out to dominate them.

To own media consumption in and around the train journey, we also planned a combination of additional channels, targeting the eyes and ears of train travellers as they hurried on their journeys.

We appeared in an extensive variety of station OOH formats: large format digital and static, small format digital, bespoke iconic London OOH sites like The Clapham Colossus, Adgates, tube escalator panels, tube digital gateways, arrival station OOH domination and activations, exterior station dominations and in-station floor vinyls and banners

Supporting channels: Commuter newspapers, location and time data allows us to reach commuters listening to music or podcasts or watching content on the journey, digital and BVOD content was served to people at home before they travel, UMG data identified key commuter audience hotspots and ‘Trains on Uber’ OOH took over their departure stations.

Our plan ran from 6th November to 24th December 2023 and reached 90% of 18-54y/o Londoners.

CONFIDENTIAL

First Time Users of Trains on Uber grew +200% and total bookings +100% whilst the campaign was live (vs pre-campaign). Ticket sales in London, where the campaign ran, increased +125% vs Manchester (#2 city for Uber train sales) which only grew +29% during the same period.

General population awareness of Train Tickets on Uber more than doubled (4% to 9%) in London and stayed relatively flat in rest of UK. Rider awareness also nearly doubled in London (14% to 27%).

AV, OOH and social assets performed above norm in quant testing with strong Brand Attention and likelihood to drive Behaviour Change. AV assets scored the highest for Brand Attention in the history of Uber Mobility Global Marketing.

Plus there was significant uplift for Awareness of trains across digital channels (+22.8pts YouTube, +22.8pts TikTok, +18.6pts Spotify, +8.5pts Meta, +7pts Snapchat and +49.4pts Activision).