Late Night 53 College Campaign

Target Audience: Metro provides Late Night weekend service from Augustana College to a local entertainment district between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. The target audience for this campaign was the several thousand students who utilize the Late Night 53 as their preferred transportation choice while enjoying a night out away from campus.

Strategy Objective:Through this ad campaign, we needed to find a way to reach students and encourage good behavior when riding the bus from the Downtown Rock Island District back to campus late at night. From there, we developed a mugshot "anti-jerk" campaign (featuring "Lou Zerr", "Ben A. Jerk", and "Kay Oss") that was deployed on Facebook and Instagram. This included five different sets of creative for social ads. Ads ran once in March with all sets of creative and then once in April/May with the two highest performing sets of creative to finish out the school semester. The approach was to step outside of traditional advertising and really hit the message home that if bad behavior creates an unwelcome situation for everyone.

Situation Challenge: Metro has provided late night bus service for Augustana College students since 2009. The route takes students from campus to a nightlife entertainment district several miles away. The bus runs weekends only from 10:00 p.m. - 2:30 a.m. Generally there is little incidents on the late night bus. Students have historically been respectful and have not misbehaved. However in the Spring of 2023, there was a string of increasingly bad behavior, which resulted in several students losing their riding privileges. Metro needed to address the bad behavior immediately.

Results Impact: The Facebook and Instagram ads ran from 3/15-3/29 and 4/25-5/28. It had a $200 spend each time that it ran for a total spend of $400. It received a total of 171,780 impressions and 1,554 engagements. This campaign built awareness to the college students and the surrounding community as a reminder of the proper way to act on the bus. The misbehavior STOPPED.

Why Submit: We were quick to develop an ad on social media to help correct the behavior. We wanted to be able to keep providing the late-night service and if the students continued to break the rules, the service might have had to be suspended. With this in mind, we needed to try to get college students' attention on social media. We were trying to find a way to stand out in their newsfeed, so we developed the mugshots. We were looking for a nice but clever way to tell them to behave on the bus.