First Bus Tap & Cap Campaign Achieves National Recognition

Vivid campaign shortlists for Northern Marketing Awards 2020

We’re proud that our marketing campaign for First Bus has reached the shortlist for this year’s Northern Marketing Awards.

First Bus selected Vivid to partner in launching its innovative new tap and cap system in South Yorkshire, which allows passengers to pay quickly and easily using contactless. Intended to make budgeting for travel simple and to drastically reduce boarding time, we designed a campaign to launch and market tap and cap across traditional and digital channels, to enable drivers to spread a clear message and to make the benefits clear and compelling.

“This was a great chance for us to flex our muscle as a truly integrated creative and campaign team” said Gerry Arcari, Vivid’s founder and manging director.

“The project was a challenge, with key aims including reaching non- and irregular bus users, to position bus travel as an easy, viable alternative; and explaining a whole new system of travel payment to regular users.”

First Bus also recognised that this new model might soon roll-out across other regions, and wanted measurable impact, which we built into the campaign, assessing awareness and take-up. Our performance marketing and digital teams developed a blend of online and offline channels, including digital advertising, local radio, outdoor media such as billboards and bus stops, local newspaper ads and YouTube video ads.

“The great thing about integrated, blended campaigns,” says Gerry, “is not just that they have so many chances to connect with audiences, but that it takes an integrated and blended team. I’d love to see that hard collaborative work being rewarded with this award, although we’re thrilled to have got this far and it shows that the quality of thinking and creative shines through.”

The impact of the campaign has seen First Bus use the same approach to roll-out across other regions, to great effect. Evidence of the impact of well-planned strategic performance marketing, we’ve achieved over 5 million page impressions, and almost 80,000 ad views on YouTube, for relatively little marketing spend. Plus, with 800 radio plays we assess that we reached every Doncaster resident 16 times over a three-month period, and with 6% of the population going to the website, we know our engagement was strong. We’re hoping that the Northern Marketing team think the same!

View All Blog Posts →