How To Ride STA Video

Target Audience: The target audience for this video was current and prospective youth riders of public transit.

Strategy Objective:We had a lot of bus-riding rules and etiquette to cover in a how-to-ride STA video. The information is somewhat dry and we worried it would be hard to keep hold of viewers' attention. So our strategy was to make the video as funny and entertaining as humanly possible. Our rule-of-thumb in writing the script was three jokes a minute. Script writing with Charles went off the rails and soon involved cakes in faces and sequences where STA staff take a blowtorch to a bus pass. We edited different versions for different audience groups. For youth and social media, the video was broken up into six short ‘chapter' episodes (which obviously did not include the buzzsaw and blowtorch scenes). The full ‘uncut' version was [Please see attached PDF]

Situation Challenge: STA was about to enact a new zero-fare for youth policy. At the same time, our region's largest school district was reducing its yellow school bus service and planned to give STA bus passes to students. We needed to prepare for a lot of young new riders who didn't know the rules on the bus. We thought a video would be the best way to reach kids — if we could make a video funny and engaging enough that they'd want to watch it multiple times. To help us, the Marketing and Communications Department turned to our secret weapon — a 16-year old part-time STA staff member, Charles Meyersberg. Charles was ‘discovered' by STA after he posted a 103-minute long video where he analyzed every bus route in the STA system. He even gave each bus route a nickname based on[ Please see attached PDF]

Results Impact: Our primary distribution channel was social media. For the through-play ratio (impressions vs. individuals who watched the video for at least 15 seconds), the How To Ride STA chapter episodes got 28-168% (industry benchmark is about 10%) — meaning each video was watched, on average, more than once by every person that saw it. In the first week, the posts had over 40K impressions — over four times what would be expected from our average impressions per post in 2022. The "Pink Flamingo Cake" chapter received the most reactions, comments and shares. It's engagement was more than double STA's average for 2022. We also turned the six chapters into Facebook ads, and they all received Above Average ranking (the highest quality ranking on Facebook) for Quality Ranking and [Please see attached PDF

Why Submit: This project was a labor of love. It was exciting for the different STA teams to work on a big project like this where STA's first teenage employee played a lead role. The video got great feedback on social media and at in-person events, and we're still hearing from riders (especially youth) how funny it was.