BART Anime Mascots to Engage Youth

Target Audience: The target audience for our Anime Mascots and out "Meet the BART Anime Mascots" event was young riders, families, and fans of the popular Japanese art form of anime.

Strategy Objective:The purpose of our "Meet the Anime Mascots" event was to get families and young people to come to a BART station on the weekend and witness the improvements to safety, cleanliness, and service we have made since the pandemic. We wanted to offer a family friendly event that would create positive buzz about BART and to get people excited about our new anime mascots. This was also a new way to promote BART's youth discount.

Situation Challenge: As remote work has had a tremendous impact on BART ridership and with weekend ridership recovering at a faster rate, BART needed new ways to promote leisure trips and to build new ridership among youth riders -- a growing and reliable ridership demographic. In 2023, BART announced five BART- and Bay Area-themed anime mascots that will help us in our mission to promote public transit to youth. The mascots were the result of an open call for California-based artists. The call was wildly popular, receiving nearly 500 submissions. BART worked with selected artists to conceptualize and create the mascots, which will serve as BART's friendly and approachable avatars to build brand affinity. We wanted to hold an in-person event at a BART station to introduce the public to our new mascots.

Results Impact: 700 people came to the event, increasing ridership at our Powell Street Station. Those who attended took photos with our anime standees, participated in our stamp rally, and played our ball capsule machine, winning exclusive BART anime swag. We gave out every item of free swag we were offering. Many families came to the event, and we engaged kids, teenagers, and young adults. Some members of the public came in cosplay of our mascots. BART offered step by step directions on how to cosplay several of the mascots by creating the costumes at home. TV news stations promoted the event and some came to the event and covered the large crowd it created.

Why Submit: Our Meet the Anime Mascots event is a great example of an outside of the box idea to grow ridership and build brand affinity with young audiences. Our event created a memorable moment for families riding BART. Everyone was pulling out their cameras to take photos with the mascots and post the pictures on their social media accounts. Those photos showcased a clean and vibrant station filled with hundreds of riders and families having a good time.