Turning Skeptics into Believers Part I
The Challenge
As an advertising agency specializing in transportation, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make public transportation more accessible and user-friendly in order to fill seats on trains, buses, the metro, and by promoting walking, biking, bike sharing, carpooling and vanpooling.
For our client Arlington County Commuter Services (ACCS), we created a campaign called the Car-Free Diet in order to encourage residents and visitors of Arlington to reduce driving alone and use alternative forms of transportation. The Car-Free Diet is branded as such because it is just that – a diet – when you go on a diet, you don’t stop eating, you just curb your eating habits. The campaign aids in branding ACCS’s products and services and demonstrates how easy it is to go car free in Arlington.
As storytellers, we wanted to create something worth talking about. In order to encourage trial of the diet, we developed an experiential social marketing campaign to reward participants with a unique real-life experience of what it would be like to live car-free for 30-days.
The Car-Free Diet Skeptics 30-Day Challenge is a contest targeting car loving residents of Arlington County willing to give car-free living a shot for the chance to win free transportation for a year. Applicants were required to submit a 2-minute video as part of the application process to tell us why they were skeptical about ditching their car keys for 30-days. With a combination of online voting and judging, two skeptics were chosen to take the challenge and they were provided with a SmarTrip card loaded with monthly fare value, a bicycle, helmet, and cycling gear, and a one month membership to Capital Bikeshare.
This user-generated contest enabled participants to use many different forms of new media and technology to document their experiences during the 30-day Challenge. They communicated via Facebook postings, Tweets, blog or vlog postings, YouTube uploads, photo postings, and checkin’s via Foursquare. The Skeptics were able to choose the media they preferred to communicate in based on their location – on the road, at work or at home – and how much time they had to do the update. Followers were able to get real-time updates on their progress during the Challenge and to become engaged with the process by posting comments on their postings, and by “friending” or “following” them on the Diet Dashboard at carfreedietskeptics.com.
During their 30-day Challenge, the Skeptics had many ways that they were able to measure their progress. This included the Car-Free Diet Calculator and Facebook Application that allowed them to get personalized estimates of how much money they saved, calories they burned, and CO2 emissions they reduced by going on the Car-Free Diet.
Season I of Skeptics featured Car-Free Todd who pledged to lose a shirt size, and Car-Free Ross who promised to sell his Mercedes Benz ML320 SUV. Season II featured Car-Free Kyle who vowed to use public transit to attend all DC United Home games, and Car-Free Matt who wanted to lose weight, save money on gas, car insurance, and parking tickets all while having a few laughs.
