Voyages-SNCF.com is mainly perceived as the online booking site of SNCF French Railways. Therefore this global online travel agency does not benefit from the growth of the market, where plane tickets sales or hotel reservations are more dynamic and profitable. To make people change their minds the idea was to use this pre-conception as the basis for an unusual campaign : communicate on the construction of the first train tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean linking Paris to New York. The revelation dramatizes the message : as it’s not possible to go everywhere by train, Voyages-sncf.com proposes much more than train.

A hoax in two steps.Teaser: we launched an online campaign with a web site. People were asked to hit Transatlantys.com to discover the background of this fabulous project. They were alsoinvited to participate in a lottery offering trips to New York. Billboards broke with a targeted outdoor and train stations media plan.Reveal : 120,000 brochures were distributed in train stations on June 3rd. The online and billboard campaign was replaced by new ads revealing the truth. Print and radio were also used to boost the reveal.