For many years, Västtrafik Public Transport have supported the local Pride festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. This year, the city hosted EuroPride – a joint festival celebrated every year in Europe hosting conversation and networking for a stronger fight for equal rights. Connected to this event, Västtrafik wanted to make a bold statement for diversity.

In addition to this, most people are very positive to public transport in general but when it comes to the provider Västtrafik, the majority is not as positive. To adress this gap, it was important to remind people of public transport as a force of inclusion and diversity. Their longtime collaboration with Pride was the perfect context to showcase this.

Västtrafik invited young artists from the LGBTQ community to repaint six of Gothenburg’s iconic trams. To make a statement for everyone’s right to public space – and public transport. The colors of the rainbow were represented by the tram line numbers; from the red number 5 to the purple number 8. The trams were then photographed, and the prints were auctioned off, giving all the proceeds to charity supporting the LGBTQ community.

In order highlight everyone's right to the public space, we had to reach beyond the LGBTQ community and into the mainstream. To do that we needed to take place in the physical public space as well as earn our place in both traditional and social media. The trams themselves were the media, reaching the target audience directly. They were covered in news stories and photographed on the streets. In addition to that, the media strategy focused on social platforms, using customized 1x1 format and sponsored posts as the major asset. In terms of PR, we did a series of national and international pushes to get coverage in both mainstream and LGBTQ media.

After a long research phase, we found six artists from the LGBTQ community, who were comfortable doing large scale paintings. Each of them got one empty tram, that they could paint however they wanted – in one of the colors of the rainbow. We transformed the tram garage into an art studio, and the artists had four days to finish their work before we uncovered the Proud Trams in front of the Swedish media. All the trams then ran though the streets of Gothenburg during the festival.

The campaign had a massive impact on social media and in traditional channels, with large organic spread. The campaign posts on social media had an engagement rate that was 171% higher than Västtrafik’s average on the same period previous years. The story was covered in almost all major Swedish news media, and several international publications.

– Articles published: +70

– Global reach: +61 000 000

– Impressions: +186 000 000