The campaign created the best results for Ruter ever. The trips were immediately overbooked - we even had to triple the capacity on the first bus trip. Ruter’s Facebook-page, which is usually used for complains, flooded with positive comments only. Even Oslo’s mayor encouraged people to join our trips.
40% of greater Oslo’s population got to know the campaign. Of these, 76% got a good/very good impression of Ruter and 50% thought Ruter made it easier to explore summer activities.
Most important: 28% said they are more positive to travel with Ruter in their spare time.
Creative Execution
For this solution, we could easily have taken beautiful photographs of the places we wanted to show people. But we brought the target audience out there and let them take the photos instead. We encouraged everyone to use the hashtag #rutersummer and created a lot of photo friendly moments, such as the tickets, the goodie bags and the event itself.
The Unknown Destination trips became a temporary product from Ruter, and also the key media channel for the campaign. In advance we launched a booking site, and we used web banners and outdoor channels to tell the target audience about it.
During the trips we filmed everything and posted a short documentation on Facebook the day after. In this way everyone got to see where the trip went, and we reminded people that they could go there with regular Ruter transportation at any time.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
Ruter is the public transportation provider in Oslo, Norway. Although many use them frequently, their liking is low. When people take time off during summer, they take time off from Ruter as well.
Our objective was to get existing customers to travel with Ruter in their spare time. We wanted to show them that summer attractions are only a short bus ride away.
Many Norwegians spend their summer holidays in Southern Europe, and tour operators offer cheap trips called “Destination Unknown”: you only know the region you’re going to, not the final destination. Many choose this option hence the price, but it is also quite intriguing! That’s why we launched “Ruter Destination Unknown” back home: cheap bus trips to an unknown summer pearl in Oslo.
In this way we created holiday associations to Ruter, and we got our target group to go crazy about traveling to their regular bus stops.