2024 Gold Travel and Leisure

Agency: TMW

Client: Govia Thameslink Railway

Entry Title: Open the door to more

Executive Summary

GTR was on a tricky journey, transitioning post-Covid from a major commuter line to leisure revenue without many iconic, exotic leisure destinations to inspire passengers.

Strategy

Unlike A-to-B commuter trips, understanding leisure is complex: everyone has a different emotive reason for a trip. The approach was to create compelling messages that were highly tailored to audiences, showing destination activities that fulfilled their emotional needs for travel and aligned with their interests.

Unlike commuters who have a singular reason to travel, leisure travellers do so for various reasons. The strategy tapped into the real reasons the audience travelled: self-discovery or family bonding time, showing them activities at destinations that could fulfil just that.

Creativity

Each trip was framed as a ‘micro-holiday’, playing into short journey times from GTR’s commuter heritage. Building on the creative platform ‘Every stop is a story’ people were invited to ‘Open the door to more’, a flexible idea using iconic train doors as a portal to transport audiences to their relevant destinations and activities.

Each execution opened the door to more, showing something new and inspiring - children in a West End theatre, wine tasting in Sussex or punting in Cambridge. Video formats stitched together ‘stories’, where the doors opened and effortlessly guided viewers through different scenes.

In social and display, a personalised approach came to life with doors opening to single scenes based on audience needs, interests and location. Audio served thousands of personalised variants, calling out origin stations closest to the listeners’ location, followed by entertaining descriptions of activities and destinations selected specifically for each listener.

Results

The tailored approach and emotive creative grabbed attention, with the summer burst seeing VTR 5x benchmark in Meta and 31% above benchmark for attention on YouTube.

Inspiring people to visit destinations translated to business results with 14% increase in footfall and multi-million pound revenue increase. The campaign cemented GTR brands in leisure with 75% - 15% increase year-on-year - saying they would consider one-time commuter lines for leisure.

The Team

Govia Thameslink Railway - Dominic Morrow, Head of Marketing - Alex Briggs, Senior Marketing Manager - Nigel Hanlon, Campaign Marketing Manager

TMW - Graeme Noble, Chief Creative Office - Esme Noble, Associate Planning Director - Alexei Awan, Senior Art Director - Heidi Sommerau, Group Account Director - Carman Kwan, Senior Account Manager - Ysabel Pheifer, Content Producer - Shaun Aylward, Content Producer - Luke Bosshard, Senior Motion Designer - Julia Olsson, Senior Motion Designer - Lloyd Francis, Motion Creative Director - Tom Rees-Kaye, Senior Editor - Liz Hickson, Head of Studio - Matt Walton, Senior Designer TMW - Tom Gillanders, Designer - Jordan Selvey, Creative Artworker - Evelina Barzdaite, Junior Designer - Victoria Henderson, Junior Designer - Joseph Cottam, Junior Designer