During the London 2012 Olympics, 12.5 million spectators and 25,000 athletes and officials were expected on the transport network, enough to bring London to a grinding halt. To ease this pressure, we aimed for a 30% reduction in background demand, primarily commuter travel through the biggest travel behaviour change programme the UK has ever seen.
London 2012 was a triumph so it will be no surprise that our campaign was a success. We didn’t just meet our targets, we exceeded them, making the world’s first public transport Olympics a reality.
High value customer insight, gained through a rigorous research programme, helped us create a campaign which combined an informational tone of voice with a light-hearted illustrative style, triggering behaviour change whilst raising a smile. It helped people avoid the coming disruption, distilling their options into simple, precise, achievable behaviours and presenting these under a memorable rallying cry, ‘Get Ahead of the Games’.
Ahead and beyond the Games
Against our 30% behaviour change target, results showed a 35% reduction during the weeks of the Games and as high as 45% on some specific days. We also achieved around 12% reduction of drivers on the roads.
We also achieved the campaign objectives with a high 86% awareness rating, which is significant given the campaign, only ran for 8 months. TfL’s reputation score also doubled from 46% to 95%.
And finally, we have seen more long term behaviour change in planning journeys. Before the Games (end of June) almost 60% of people were planning a journey within an hour of intending to travel, planning at the last minute. During the Games and since then this figure has reduced to 40% with about 35% planning over 1 and up to 12 hours in advance. Advance journey planning rather than chancing it, was a key message platform of the campaign which stuck.
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