The Brief

The Santos Tour Down Under is Australia’s biggest cycling event and is on the UCI World Tour alongside other races like the Tour De France. The problem was that cycling is a low profile sport in Australia and attending The Santos Tour Down Under wasn’t even on the cycling communities radar. With little budget we were asked to create some billboards to direct cyclists to the event.

Creative Execution

Cyclists are a very hard audience to reach. The only way to target them perfectly is to hit the only place they congregate together - cycling routes. The routes we targeted were extremely well-researched and The Puppet Peloton was able to track down cyclists, direct them to the website and lead them to the event. But we not only needed to find cyclists, we needed our campaign to make an impact when they saw it. And a peloton made of puppets, cycling alongside our audience did just that.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our idea was to get 12 of the worlds best cyclists to travel the country and directly target our audience on the nations most popular cycling routes. Kind of. Part machine, part magic, The Puppet Peloton is 12 mechanical cyclists with 24 articulating legs and a top speed of 80 kilometres an hour. It’s message directed cyclists to the website and asked them to “Follow the Peloton to The Santos Tour Down Under”. We planned to travel the country and target every cyclist in Australia. 1 at a time.

Results

The Puppet Peloton toured 4 weeks, travelled over 2000kms, was seen by over 1 million cycling fans, reached 150,000 plus on social media and was picked up on national tv. But most importantly it was noticed and followed by cycling fans everywhere.