London has suffered illegal levels of air pollution since 2010 and on some measures is worse than New Delhi and Beijing.

To combat this Mayor Sadiq Khan has championed the hugely controversial ULEZ. While many support it, the backlash has been significant with demonstrations against the £24 charge by taxi drivers and small business owners gaining national media coverage.

Electric vehicles are exempt so we knew most car marques would be talking about their electric range during the launch of ULEZ.

We needed to find a way of raising awareness of the Renault Zoe amongst Londoners in a way that would rise above the noise.

Our social listening team found a huge uptick in negative sentiment about ULEZ.

We took advantage of this negative sentiment, and turned it into something more positive.

Under the campaign line “Keep it Clean” we set out to help clean up London’s air and twitter too.

Based on a lexicon of over 200 swear words we built an algorithm which pulled in live tweets from angry drivers. And parked a Zoe over the offending swear words.

These ‘cleaner’ tweets were then served up to digital OOH sites on all London’s major roads – targeting drivers on their daily commute.

We also contacted some of the angry tweeters and asked them to talk about their ULEZ frustrations.

We turned these conversations into radio commercials, “bleeping” out each swear word with a “Renault Zoe” audio mnemonic.

Again spots were bought during drive time on all of London's major radio stations.

The purpose of the campaign was to raise awareness amongst people who drive into London, now more receptive to electric vehicles thanks to the ULEZ charge.

However, we knew most car brands would be shouting about their products. So we decided to do something different. Listen.

We set up a lexicon of over 200 swear words and created an algorithm that trawled Twitter for ULEZ frustrations geotagged to London.

A Renault Zoe was digitally ‘parked’ over offending swear words and served to media platforms.

By hijacking the conversation going in the real-world drivers began to target our poster sites – sending filthy tweets so they’d get cleaned up and appear around London.

This enabled us to gather the data of even more prospects. And each was contacted with the offer of a test drive.

We even used the data to contact Londoners to appear in our radio campaign too.

We began gathering data to build the campaign assets in mid May and digital OOH ran in nearly 100 sites on all of the major roads leading into central London from the launch of ULEZ on April 8th.

As the live data gathered momentum, it was served out to geotargeted high-impact Newsbrand placements and Automotive online titles. And some of our star tweeters were recorded venting their ULEZ frustrations making guest appearances in radio spots which played out on London’s top seven commercial stations during drive time. Simultaneously prospect data was harvested and each participant in the campaign was offered a test drive.

The campaign launched just a few weeks ago at time of writing – so we’re still waiting for results from Renault dealerships.

However all metrics are up, and test drives are forecast to more than double this quarter.

But there’s perhaps no greater testament to the power of the coverage it received than the fact that one of the media owners pulled the campaign.

The boss of one of the top three media companies in the UK is a close friend of Mayor Sadiq Khan.

And while our campaign is pro clean air, the traction it received – which foregrounded Londoner’s frustrations – clearly hit a nerve.