our workNetwork Rail / You Vs Train: Hacking skip functionality to save lives
Trespass on the railway is a major issue. People mistakenly believe they understand all the risks – and are overly confident in their ability to avoid them. If I can safely cross a busy road, I can manage an empty train track, right?
Wrong.
It’s easy to box off trespass as a young person problem, but 75% of trespassers are over 18. How do we raise awareness of the dangers of trespass and get grown adults to stop taking entirely unnecessary risks with their personal safety? By hacking the skip functionality of pre-roll videos in a technically audacious, world-first media buy that reduced adult trespass on the railway by 17%.
It’s always about the positive impact…
World-first media buy
Media and technological innovation
Half of users wanted to learn more
Helping us raise safety awareness by 17%
A 17% reduction in trespass
Which is what it’s all about…
Working with people’s natural instincts
One of the biggest excuses given for trespassing is taking a shortcut. Which gave us the hook for our creative strategy…
“You can skip this ad in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…” Our finger’s twitching, waiting, along with 84% of people watching the YouTube vid alongside us. We delay the start of ‘I’m a Celebrity…’, to fast forward through the ads – like 2/3 of viewers. We scrub through YouTube tutorials to get past the tedious, overly-chatty intro.
Impatience is now fully baked in to modern life. We’re all eager to shortcut the boring bit to get to the good stuff. But there’s still one area where shortcuts are universally understood to be A Bad Thing: shortcuts around safety. No one wants to hear that engineers or officials cut corners in safety – so why do we shortcut it ourselves?
We took this widely shared behaviour and insight, and applied it to a rail context, to show our audience that when you shortcut rail safety, it can end badly...
Interactive pre-rolls with a fake 'Skip ad' button
Before we even pitched the idea to our client, we needed to make sure there was a publisher out there brave enough to run it, so we reached out to Reach Media to scope a user-controlled interactive video experience with them that allowed people to see for themselves what happens if they try to shortcut safety.
The pre-roll begins with video 1 - a straightforward, earnest safety message, delivered by a likeable presenter. After a few seconds, a fake 'Skip ad' button fades in, and the user has a choice to make: watch what they have been told is an important safety message, or shortcut it...?
Many media partners wouldn’t entertain the idea of a misleading, decoy ‘Skip ad’ button, but Reach bought into the idea and the message, and felt it was worth potentially ruffling a few feathers over. We worked with them and the production team at Mediaocean to build the interactive functionality using VPAID, creating two videos: the full safety video, and a second video that loaded in the background, ready to seamlessly blend with the first no matter when the user hit 'Skip'.
Those that watched Video 1 to the end received the safety messages and a thank you for not shortcutting safety. Those that skipped were immediately served with a brutal, graphic VFX wipe out of our presenter - followed by a stark delivery of the dangers around the railway. It was important that both versions of the video delivered the key messages in a succinct and engaging format, to make sure the campaign performed for both skipping and non-skipping audiences.
A campaign that outperformed all its metrics
Our message hit home with both the 55% of users who watched the full video, and the 45% that tried to skip our ‘boring’ safety ad - that’s over 1.1 million skips… The campaign outperformed all Network Rail trespass campaign predecessors at the time, on all KPIs, delivering a 17% reduction in trespass, a 17% increase in safety awareness and prompting half of users to find out more. And - only 1 in 10 users were annoyed by the fake skip - which could have been worse... ;-)
The creative ambition, technical wizardry and outstanding results have been recognised by multiple industry awards for Media, Innovation, Disruption and Creativity.
“It’s a complex problem and we needed an innovative way of speaking to people about shortcuts. We wanted something that would stop people in their tracks - excuse the pun - and make them consider the message we’re trying to deliver. The solution that Storycatchers reached addressed that perfectly. The campaign performed against all our core objectives and achieved great awareness, message take out and it was memorable which is exactly what it needed to be.”
Donna Mitchell, Senior Campaigns Manager, Network Rail
Huge thanks to our video production partners at Space for once again pulling out all the stops to deliver an outstanding film for us, and to the team at Mediaocean for the technical wizardry that ensured the wipeout moment was flawless.