The Campaign

By interviewing the bus drivers of Incheon, we found the problem was they had very tight driving schedules every day and naturally they got tired easily. Moreover, during the long driving distance about 3~4 hours, they didn’t have any talk with anybody. They wanted to talk with passengers, get smiling and drive the bus calmly. Instead of a nobody-cared campaign like ‘let’s cheer up our drivers’ through the public poster etc., we wanted to solve in some natural way to make the bus drivers refresh, smile, and drive smoothly by the people’s direct action. And we found that every passengers were supposed to push the button to send a get-off sign to the driver and tried to make a sound of cheering up voice message after the button call.

Creative Execution

The speaker production was designed in the lowest level of digital tech for durability and easy operating. With a line, the speaker recognized the button pushed and then one voice message, such as “Thank you, driver!”, “I hope today is the best day for you!”, “You make me safe” etc., sounded after the button ringing sound. Not to annoy the bus passengers, the voice message designed to sound one in one bus stop and not to sound with the audio Adverts together. During the production, we tried to find the citizens to join it and record their real voices with the explanation of this campaign. Taking 16 weeks of experiment time and recording time, we installed the device in No. 8, No. 511 buses. After installation and operation, we released the campaign film in facebook and advertised the film by facebook Page post ad to target audiences.

The advertising budget was only 6,475 USD, but the campaign film was shared 499 times, got 5,135 likes, 492 replies within one week. And about 30 Korean locan and national presses reported the campaign in positive opinions. And another small city in Korea, Naju city, requested the technical design map and execution knowhow.

This campaign is executed by using the bus bell button as the key media. For cheering up the bus drivers at the moment they get tired, we designed a process that a speaker operated when passenger pushed the bell button. From the speaker, the drivers could hear a thank you voice message of the citizen. By the ambient media in the bus, not only the drivers but also the passengers could hear the voice message, as the result, all of them had a chance to think about the bus drivers’ efforts naturally.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

For the best meaning and effectiveness, we researched which bus line was the longest distance line and was the most popular line of 20s in Incheon. Because 20s passenger could be active to share by their SNS pages, we could expect to earn free PR impact by them. Secondly, we designed the unique speaker device for this campaign. The speaker was designed to sound the voice message of a certain citizen after the bus stop rang. And the voice messages were collected up to 156 messages of 156 persons living in Incheon. For the sincerity of the campaign, we planned three things. First, any press activities would not start until the speaker installation day. Second, we pictured the all processes of device production, voice recording, interviewing the bus drivers, and the final execution without omission. Third, we released the campaign film on the Facebook page at first.