Overview:

Wellington faced a significant challenge with a shortage of bus drivers, causing widespread disruptions and numerous cancellations throughout the city. This issue caused a lot of inconvenience among the residents but also raised concerns about the reliability of the public transportation system.

Tranzurban, a part of the Tranzit group, operates 60% of the Metlink bus network across Wellington city, Hutt Valley and the Wairarapa. Tranzurban strategically collaborated with 1Up to address the shortage and recruit bus drivers. Beyond addressing operational challenges, the collaboration also aimed to enhance Tranzurban's brand image by humanising the company and its drivers. The goal was not only to rectify the immediate driver shortage, but also to foster a more appealing and relatable image of Tranzurban, ultimately attracting more individuals to join their team and contribute to improved public transportation in Wellington

Background:

Prior to this campaign, we ran an initial phase 1 before during the early months of 2023. The objective was to generate leads for Tranzurban to recruit drivers and was mainly targeted towards students. We delivered increased visibility of the Tranzurban brand around the Wellington region.

This was a priority for Tranzurban not only to generate awareness, but to humanise the brand to attract more drivers. To deliver this objective, we selected media formats and channels that would help humanise Tranzurban. Targeting the right audience was also a top priority.

Phase 1 enabled a strong foundation of creative assets to be built. These assets were still useful for the current phase of the campaign. 

Approach:

With the creative assets such as microsite and a strong creative direction for the campaign in place, we concentrated on two key deliverables such as Content and Media Placement.

We focused on developing more content that could be used in a variety of media channels (both paid and organic) to bring the Tranzurban story to life. This was to be a mixture of imagery, video as well as written content that focuses on both current drivers and the business overall.

We also wanted to have a larger presence across YouTube and Facebook with less investments in placements such as Google. This included a camera interview of four bus on-site bus drivers with videos ranging from 60-90 seconds that will be used for video adverts. Our approach also included updating the creative assets required for various bus backs and supplying art-ready files.

Delivery and Outcome:

We launched campaigns in three channels to bring a human face to the Tranzurban brand. We opted for Google Search Ads, YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads to get the messaging across. 

We used the video interviews as YouTube Ads with the primary focus of creating awareness and this delivered 363,114 impressions, generating 63,175 views.

On Social Media, we had a mixed approach of awareness and conversion based campaigns. This approach delivered 432,017 impressions and reached 133,872 users while generating 108 leads. 

In Google Ads, we focused solely on generating conversions and this campaign delivered 21,278 impressions generating 489 clicks and 30 conversions. 

Overall, the campaign was a resounding success with 238 leads generated through all sources throughout the campaign period. This resulted in 63 new drivers being recruited.record

These leads have had a huge impact on the city which were in dire need of bus drivers. Our campaign played a pivotal role in reshaping the perception of the Tranzurban brand and helped Wellingtonians to get moving with any hassles!