To break this habit, we needed to give people a foresight into the whole journey, before they set out:

To compete with the short lived traffic advice given by commuters at every stop, we focused on moving the traffic and route conversation before people would need to ask each other. We did this in 2 steps:

1. Compelling hook to catch attention: According to our research conducted across 8 top cities- it was validated that uncertainty of the Indian roads was increasing rapidly. We dialled this up in our creatives to grab attention

2. Reach and solve before the IPS kicks In - Reach people before they could get advice from each other and offer them credible and actionable information to plan their entire commute better

The Idea:

Look Before You Leave

Campaign duration - Nov to Dec 2016:

1. Hyper-local 250+ OOH at 4 key cities with ~230 Million Impressions: In placements right before key bottlenecks, hyper-local messaging drove up the uncertainty by renaming the road it’s placed on into its jammed version

2. Dynamic OOH with maps UI in Malls: Right before busy mall exits, Dynamic OOH were placed for people to click & see their entire route at once

3. Targeted & Timed Social & Digital Display Campaign: Reach of over 67M unique users, creatives focused on contextual messaging when people were pre/mid commute

4. TV, YouTube ads and News Integration: 21M reached with TV campaign, India’s first traffic segment on a news channel and 9.8M views on YouTube, the creatives gave people a reason to look beforehand, by showing the uncertainty of Indian roads

5. 4500 Radio spots in 2 Stations/City: Drove up usage mid-commute

With just 1 burst of the campaign, we managed to significantly change a habit:

1. DAU growth: We saw an overall lift of 18.6% in daily active users(DAUs) during the campaign period, with our top performing city (Mumbai) hitting a 48.4% increase in DAUs

2. Stickiness to this new behaviour: DAUs have maintained their end-of campaign levels post campaign, after a slight dip in the start of Jan.

For all things traffic, people now turned to Google Maps

3. Feature uplift: There was an awareness and usage uplift across test cities, esp. in regards to our focus features of real-time traffic (8% uplift) and ETA (10% uplift). This also led to an overall uplift for Google Maps and its features across the board (15% higher in user base reporting daily usage in test markets v. control cities)