Situation

Once famous as the ‘garden city’, Bengaluru (aka Bangalore) is now notorious for its terrible traffic. It is the baseline against which all other traffic in India is compared.

Infrastructural solutions by the municipal authorities and the state government (flyovers, metro rail) have not kept pace with Bengaluru’s traffic congestion. Many brands have created campaigns around it, comics have written jokes about it, memes and songs abound. But for the world’s second most congested city (Source: TomTom Traffic Index 2022), real change isn’t felt on the ground.

Brief

The Times of India (TOI), India’s largest circulated English daily, had written about Bengaluru’s traffic plenty of times. But this time, just writing was not enough.

The brief was simple:

• Don’t just do a good-looking ad campaign.

• Don’t talk big picture.

• Solve the traffic problem for the people of Bengaluru.

Objective

Real, immediate, measurable impact felt by commuters.

Realizing that there is no big fix or magical solution, we turned to an untapped source – local knowledge. TOI launched ‘Unjam Bengaluru’, a crowd-sourced campaign that invited residents to participate in solving micro-level traffic issues. We created a first-of-its-kind user generated traffic map, hosted on a mobile responsive website, where people could report traffic issues real-time. The traffic department partnered us.

Impact – ‘Unjam Bengaluru’ has generated over 4,000 suggestions from residents, of which 105 have already been acted on by authorities. The best part, authorities acted on 25 of the 105 suggestions before TOI could even report them.

Supplementary results:

• Reach – 18.5M

• Total Engagement – 7M

• Average CTR – 23.12%

The success was so overwhelming that TOI extended its eight-week campaign for more suggestions pour in. TOI even published 25 impact stories to highlight these changes, encouraging further inputs.

N/A.

TOI is the undisputed English daily market leader in Bengaluru, with 3X the circulation of its nearest English daily competitor. This is despite being around for a lesser time than Southern India-based English dailies such as The Hindu and Deccan Herald. This leadership also translates to a strong city connect, where the newspaper brand gives the maximum space to covering local issues. The authorities are also forced to take accountability and action when an issue is highlighted in TOI.

While TOI continued to be a market leadership during the pandemic years, the newspaper was looking to embellish its leadership credentials further. And what better way than to take on the most prominent issue in Bengaluru – it’s traffic!

Bengaluru’s temperate weather and lovely forestation made it a retirement abode. However, India’s burgeoning IT landscape found a base in the “Garden City”, after which there was no looking back. People flocked in from all over, and by 2022, the city and the state of Karnataka together employed 4 million people in the IT industry (Source: The Hindu newspaper).

Unfortunately, the city’s infrastructure never grew with pace. Not only are the small roads not wide enough for heavy traffic, additional construction has also largely been unplanned and is often delayed. Whatever empty areas are left are often occupied by hawkers and vendors. The bad condition of roads and poor traffic management all come together to create the perfect storm for terrible traffic in the city.

But Bengaluru also has an active volunteering culture, where people come together for initiatives. And what better one than to improve Bengaluru’s traffic?