When we know that, 25% of people classify the traffic as a stress component in their real life (anger and aggressiveness can actually become real symptoms following a bad-traffic-experience); it’s seemed accurate to transform this insight in opportunity.

Consumers needed to be convinced by real-time information at the moment it mattered the most.

Like initiating the conversation when we knew they were going to travel a long distance, showing them that their projected arrival time was longer than expected as they are driving down a busy highway or reminding them how bad was their travel to their final destination shortly after they arrived.

Before

We identified drivers about to travel by targeting those who looked up for weather or traffic information for a destination outside their home town with digital banners and SEM communicating real-time travel times for car versus train.

During

With digital out-of-home, we covered all of the major highways between Quebec and Toronto. The message was adapted in real-time, displaying the estimated arrival time based on the location of each sign and current traffic conditions. Because it was based on the geo-location of each board, the message was always customized.

After

We leveraged our out-of-home partnership to collect all the mobile deviceIDs of drivers exposed to the advertising as well as drivers who were stuck in traffic jams. We then re-targeted these drivers as they arrived at their destination, displaying a personalized message that reminded them of the frustration of being in traffic and the benefits of taking the train.

VIA Rail succeed at stealing shares to what seemed an unbeatable competition: car! Train ridership rose by 11.7% year-over-year, and revenues increased by 13.9%, to the expense of cars.

All of our media tactics greatly outperformed the usual standards. Contextualized messages generated click rates that were 95% higher than all of our display and mobile campaigns, and they helped increase the conversion rate by 14% on VIA Rail's booking engine.

Steeling transportation shares from cars is a huge challenge. We don’t have to convince people to adopt our company, but to change their transportation habits.

We built a whole media ecosystem based on real-time traffic feed, to warn, prove, and convince people to take the train at the right moment. To do so we leverage data to follow drivers along their transportation journey. Once we collect the info, we segmented and merged them to create our real-time feed; the one who guide all our touchpoints and provide a unique message at millions of car drivers in real time.

The campaign strategy was to leverage real-time traffic and weather data to maximize the relevance of the message for motorists. We compared real-time travel information for both transportation options: when traffic or bad weather conditions arise, drivers were reminded they took the wrong transportation mode.

Partnerships with Google Maps and the Weather Network made our data strategy come to life. We created programming interfaces specifically for this campaign and integrated the data feed at each touch point, enabling the real-time data management and synchronization across all out-of-home and digital channels.

Our challenge was to provide drivers with real-time traffic information on each of the 16 stretches of highways covered by VIA Rail. At any given point in time, the message was customized to each consumer. It took into consideration their current geo-position, their predicted end destination and real-time traffic and weather data.

In the markets covered by VIA Rail, Canada's national rail passenger service, the car is the fastest option when the road conditions are ideal. Most of the time however, when traffic and bad weather get in the way, the train becomes the best solution.

When consumers plan a trip from Point A to Point B, their primary concern is to have the shortest travel time. This is a global truth, but it is especially powerful in Canada because its vast territories can make travel time even longer.

Because of their unconditional love of cars, drivers tend to be overly optimistic about how long it actually takes to get somewhere by car, failing to factor real-time road conditions into their calculations.