Describe the “problem” that the McCann Agency was asked to solve. (This includes a brief “situation analysis.”)
MT contacted McCann Agency due to own inability to influence the observed level of accidents and deaths, which occurred due the passengers’ reckless behavior. The statistics showed that “serious incidents involving train operations totaled 21 in 2008, 24 in both 2009 and 2010, and 27 in 2011” (Queltch, 2014). The agency was asked to develop an efficient advertising campaign, which would educate people, in specific young and skeptical audience, about safety proof behavior in metro facilities and motivate them to follow these regulations on a daily basis, in order to decrease the general level of incidents.
Why had previous efforts/Public Service Announcements (PSAs) failed to change behavior?
The initial PSAs were delivering instructions over loudspeakers on stations. I believe that this way was ineffective, because not many people were actually listening to whatever was being said over loudspeakers, when taking metro. There are a lot of obstacles to while trying to reach the audience in such a way: the record itself may be of a poor quality, as well as the necessary equipment can be damaged, which irritates the listeners; many people use headphones while taking a ride in metro, so they simply do not hear the message; the sound of recorded rules does not encourage people to obey, since nobody likes to be directly told what to do; the majority of rule breakers is youth, who is simply avoiding any boring activities and prefer to show off about that in front of their friends. As the result, the main warning message could have not been delivered to the audience.
What specific challenges did McCann face in this assignment? List and describe them. Be specific.
First of all the agency had to develop an effective advertising campaign within a limited budgeting of $200,000, which could be not enough to assure massive audience coverage, moreover, it limited the possible points of influence. Secondly, McCann had to develop a new and effective way to deliver the message, since the previous methods had shown no results due to being simply ignored: “the brief was to make something invisible visible to try and do something that would actually work for once because nothing that had ever been done worked” (Queltch, 2014).
What specific outcome did Metro Trains Victoria seek from this campaign?
First of all the initial idea of acting safe was distributed widely via different communicational channels. It was discussed and appreciated, which lead to the second and most important outcome, since MT had reached its goal: “Metro trains reported a 30% reduction in near-miss accidents, from 13.29 near-miss per million kilometers traveled from November 2011 to January 2012, to 9.17” (Quelch, 2014) from 2012 to 2013 respectively. The initial desire to promote safe behavior had then came to life.
Why/was the campaign successful? How/did the strategy contribute to the outcome? What is the evidence for your conclusions?
McCann’s strategy to make educational campaign “fun, engaging and immensely shareable” (Quelch, 2014) had lead to its huge success and popularity. Their message acknowledging mass about the consequences was spread with numerous communicational channels: iTunes store, humor sites, YouTube, social networks, metro stations, etc. The idea of talking about restrictions with dark humor’s help worked so well, that the song “quickly reached the top 10 iTunes and sold 10,000 copies within three weeks on Nielsen SoundScan” and was later charted in 28 countries, (Quelch, 2014), in 10 days after being posted the video clip gained 37,000 shares on Facebook and 27,000 likes, and by July 2013 it was viewed 57 million times and deserved the title of most shared PSA in history, even the mobile application was named a number one in 17 countries.
The strategy’s contribution was to make the idea of safe behavior popular, which resulted in MT receiving one of the most effective leverage, which was being talked about. Not only the message was delivered to the target audience, it was recognized all over the world.
Works Cited
Quelch, J. “”Dumb Ways to Die”: Advertising Train Safety (A)”. Harvard Business School June 20th, 2014. 9-514-079. Print.
Quelch, J. “”Dumb Ways to Die”: Advertising Train Safety (B)”. Harvard Business School June 20th, 2014. 9-514-080. Print.
Quelch, J. “”Dumb Ways to Die”: Advertising Train Safety (A)”. Harvard Business School June 20th, 2014. 9-514-081. Print.
