Action Stations
Agency: Hope&Glory
In an increasingly competitive market, Trainline, the online ticket seller and journey planner, wanted to maintain its position as the leader in train travel. It needed to drive differentiation and brand affinity.
Creative agency Hope&Glory was tasked with developing a purpose-led initiative that would drive brand warmth and positive perception.
Every month, 96 million people open the Trainline app - often at or around train stations. At the same time, almost 170,000 children and adults are reported missing to the police every year.
In fact, somebody is reported missing every 90 seconds. Train and bus stations can serve as both a safe haven and a one-way ticket from a current situation.
Action Stations is a campaign that allows charity Missing People to deliver appeals directly into the Trainline app - a first for both organisations.
Engineers at Trainline created a space for appeals to be shared (and removed or replaced once a missing person had been found) to deliver thousands of alerts daily across the user base, but, importantly, the alerts were also geo-located to those areas in which people had gone missing, improving the chances of finding them.
Hope&Glory worked with Kevin Gosden, whose son Andrew, then aged 14, disappeared in September 2007, after emptying his bank account and buying a one-way ticket from Doncaster to London’s King’s Cross station, where the last known image of him was recorded on CCTV.
Gosden, who featured in the campaign’s launch video, said that the app, had it existed in 2007, would have displayed Andrew’s image to thousands of members of the public in the area where he went missing.
Within an hour of the campaign’s launch, more than 120 items of coverage had gone live. This included pieces on BBC News Online, METRO, Evening Standard, Daily Mail, The Sun and Daily Express, as well as broadcast coverage across BBC news bulletins, Sky News and Channel 5 News.
The campaign featured no fewer than 16 times across national news bulletins on launch day, but was also extensively covered by many local media.
To support the launch, a billboard advertising campaign was live for one week in 74 train stations across the country, featuring images of Andrew Gosden, with information on how to contact Missing People.
In its first month, there were 753,000 missing people alerts in the UK served via the Trainline app. And in that time, ten families were reunited as a result of these alerts.
Research also revealed that 71% of existing Trainline users felt more favourable towards the brand after the campaign, while traffic to the app doubled in the week after the campaign launched.
The idea, although designed for the UK, is now being rolled out with local missing people organisations across European markets.