The perception of the Cycle Hire scheme is that it is quite a complicated process, so the super simple, bold, graphic illustration style, together with witty and ‘myth busting’ headlines aimed to challenge this perception. The posters ran in London, across the entire transport network including bus stops, train and tube stations, even on the vans that delivered the bikes to docking station, The fact that the posters all appeared at the same time, and their distinctive style and strong colour palter created a big impact.

This campaign was the most successful Barclays Cycle Hire campaign to date. Not only did we surpass our hire target of 9,678,000 hires even before the year was up, with 10,023,897 hires by December (3.6% above target and 25% more hires than 2013), we also had the busiest month and day since launch.

It also successfully shifted key campaign and behaviour metrics. Campaign recognition surpassed targets to reach 47%, 50% agree that Cycle Hire looks/is easy to use (a key metric from our myth busting strategy), 63% agreed that “The ads gave me a much better understanding of how easy it is to start using the Cycle Hire scheme” and 43% agreed that “The ads make Barclays Cycle Hire look fun to people like me”.

Our campaign increased cycling as a whole, with 22% of users claiming to use the scheme at least once a month, this grows amongst campaign recognisers to 37% versus 8% of non-recognisers, 39% of Barclays Cycle Hire users say the scheme has increased their cycling at least ‘a little’ and 49% of intended users of Cycle Hire think it will increase the amount they intend to cycle as a whole.