Our workNetwork Rail / Powering Freight Britain campaign
Rail Freight is Britain’s hidden lifeline, a 24/7 network that’s absolutely vital to our lives and economy – and central to the work of Network Rail. The pandemic created an unprecedented opportunity for Network Rail to grow its freight operations and support a more sustainable mode of transport for the nation’s freight. But within Network Rail freight, is often seen as secondary to passenger operations and many colleagues in the business are unaware of how their role can impact freight.
Educating and changing perceptions
The primary target audience for our campaign was Network Rail’s own employees, almost 40,000 of them, who when surveyed, 76% admitted they knew ‘little or nothing’ about freight, as their day-to-day work centres around the passenger railway. Secondary audiences included the rail freight industry, Network Rail customers and the public.
So how could we cut through to this disengaged audience and make them understand that their actions have a direct impact on the freight network?
The solution: ‘Powering Freight Britain’
We dug deep into the rail freight story, with an extensive discovery process involving 25 stakeholder interviews from signallers and rail operators to directors and industry ambassadors. This informed a bold new narrative, messaging framework and proposition for Network Rail’s Freight offering, celebrating the major contribution rail freight makes to the nation.
Our design team got to work on a striking visual identity, and the creative solution pays homage to the aesthetics of rail industry graphic design from the 1980s, brought to life with a contemporary colour palette.
With all these elements in place, we developed an arresting, energetic 10-week multi-channel campaign titled ‘Powering Freight Britain’, targeting almost all areas of Network Rails’ functions and regions.
The Freight Escape – a four-part docuseries
The hero content was ‘The Freight Escape’, a series of short videos, telling the rich stories of the freight network around Great Britain. With four landmark locations and five days of filming, this ‘road trip on rails’ stopped off at Drax Power Station, North Yorkshire, Tarmac’s operation at Tunstead Quarry, Derbyshire, Tata Steel’s Port Talbot Steelworks and The Port of Felixstowe – Britain’s busiest port.
Media channels and results.
Campaign elements included case studies, news articles, Yammer content, new freight website pages, a MyConnect freight hub, Customer Service Live video, Network Magazine article, freight team assets, and decals in the MK Quad building. The campaign far exceeded expectations for engagement:
• 85,484 combined video and content views and 968 reactions
• 19,996 views on Yammer (internal social media channel)
• 1,231 reactions on LinkedIn with 77 comments and 103 reposts
Encouraged by this rection, Network Rail shared the campaign externally, and the rail freight community embraced the campaign, praising its passion, energy and the depth of insight into the industry. Within weeks, the Freight Escape videos became most watched content on the Rail Freight Group’s YouTube Channel, attracting almost 30,000 views.
Client feedback:
Our main client, Henry Bates, Head of Freight emailed to say:
“It’s ridiculously good – I’m so pleased with that. Massive, massive well done!! Awesome. I could list endless things I love about it.”
Katie Moses our comms contact said:
“ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! 😊 Steve’s energy is fab. I forgot I was watching an internal video, it could have been on the tele. I particularly like the humour too – with a honk in case we fell asleep. Made me laugh. The explosion was so cool, glad you managed to capture it.”
The Freight Escape continues…
Thanks to the overwhelmingly positive reaction from within Network Rail and the wider freight community, our client has commissioned further work – with two more videos now in production. We’ll soon be hitting the rails once again to explore even more of Freight Britain.
