The RAC has over 90% market share in WA, so stability is always a key objective. The shrinking market meant less people were renewing their RAC membership, and fewer new motorists were joining. The campaign helped to reverse that trend.Renewal rates rose from 87% to 88%, more people migrated to a higher level of membership and the new member acquisition rate actually increased. As a result, the RAC has been able to beat its new business revenue target by 9.3%.

Our idea was to replicate the frequency of breakdowns by using multiple daily newspaper executions, each delivering a new and surprising breakdown fact.The State newspaper carries iconic large page numbers, so we thought, what if we could use those numbers to communicate how many breakdowns occur? All we had to do was marry the number to the fact, and use the newspaper layout to make the small space ads stand out.So the day before each edition of the newspaper, we were told which page numbers were available to use. We were then able to work with the client to quickly identify a breakdown fact that related to that number, then write the headline and prepare artwork within an hour.In a typical week we had up to six executions running, sometimes multiple versions in each newspaper.

This campaign is not just about an effective idea, it’s also about a three way partnership between agency, media and client to overcome the logistics needed to make it happen.

The Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia (RAC) is the local market leader in breakdown recovery. However, the market is shrinking because motorists believe that modern cars don’t break-down.The challenge was to confront people with evidence that breakdowns happen to all sorts of people all the time, for all sorts of reasons.

In fact, the RAC attends over 1,000 breakdowns every day in Perth, a city of 1.6m people.So we wanted to create a campaign that would bring these facts to life with the same kind of frequency in which breakdowns happen; to create the sense that breakdowns are all around us.