Published on
December 17, 2024
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Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ perception change ✨ - when marketers want to change the way people think about a thing. Real inception stuff.
Months after it already happened.
For those who don’t know, earlier this year Transport For London announced that they were giving new names to different parts of the Overground, a line on London’s tube network.
The Overground is complicated, and has grown bigger and bigger, so the 6 new names refer to different chunks of it. There’s Liberty, Suffragette, Lioness, Windrush, Weaver and Mildmay. Each name comes from a particular part of London’s history and culture.
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But to those who do know, this is old news. The announcement was made months ago, there was a bit of noise at the time, and then it all died down. So why a campaign now?
Well, this campaign “aims to engage and inspire Londoners” which sounds… flimsy, but really, I think this must be a campaign that aims to do some kind of embedding work. Get people to remember the different new lines, where they go and what they mean.
Take the Northern line. Londoners know what the Northern line means - yes, it does go to North London, but it also means getting to Soho or Camden on a Saturday night. Likewise, the Victoria line means… going to Victoria and some other places, the Central line means hot and busy, and the District line means you’re going to have a miserable, delayed journey. People have perceptions and preconceptions about the old lines. They don’t have them (yet) for the new ones. And, to the point of the campaign, that makes it harder to use them.
People navigate the old lines by memory. So the new names, and the stories of the names and the places those names come from, are what TfL and VCCP are trying to use to act as a placeholder for the new lines. Give it a few years, and Londoners will use the word Suffragette to refer to a train line more than the equal voting rights movement (now, whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know…)
Anyway, here’s the work so you can see what I mean:
Terrible pun, sorry.
World ID is a company I had never heard of before this week. They create digital identification verification services, letting people prove they are real without ever sharing any actual real data about themselves.
Which I learned when I visited their site, just after I told them I don’t want to accept all their cookies (thanks, GDPR).
They launched a campaign parodying Spotify Wrapped:
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This is some pretty straightforward inception here, since we all pretty much agree already that big internet companies have way too much data about each of us, and we don’t like that.
The funny thing is that Spotify (and the others who create similar data round-ups) managed to change our perception that in some cases, this was actually a really good thing. So World ID find themselves having to reverse the inception done by others.
I remember there being a campaign a few years ago from Revolut, which was addressed to the 12,000ish people who ordered dinner for one on Valentine’s Day. It turned out that the number was fake (no real way for your bank to know exactly what you ordered, as far as I know), but got some backlash because (1) it called people out in a rude, not friendly way, and (2) because it was the kind of data that felt like it should be private. On the other hand, the kind of music we listen to is often ‘public’ - we’re happy to tell people, keep our playlists public, post photos of ourselves at concerts, whatever it is.
Anyway, World ID’s campaign is funny, but I’m not too sure of its aims. Yes, there’s the obvious aim to get people to understand that World ID does not listen and snoop and track your data. And to be fair, in today’s world, that’s a pretty big claim to be able to make. But I think what I’m missing is a sense of urgency. They’re highlighting the problem with data collection, but not telling me what to do about it. Visit their site? To do what? Are they a Spotify competitor?
I’m just missing the point. But then again, maybe I’m missing the point. Could this be… shock horror, a pure awareness campaign? In this economy? My word.
Kinda love this one, I can’t lie.
Ford Pro (not a brand name I was specifically familiar with, but what I assume is the Ford arm that sells commercial vehicles) launched a campaign to highlight the fact that there is £3.5bn owed in late payments to UK tradies. Which is honestly nuts.
The campaign features a pair of twins who have taken on the role of ‘little debt collectors’, claiming back the money owed to their parents by people who asked for their services.
There’s such a fine line that Ford had to work with here - make the twins slightly too obnoxious about the way they claimed back the money, and you’ll send people to the hills. Make it too sob-story-ish, and you’ll get pity’s ugly cousin - classic British indignation.
But no - the twins are funny, the editing is funny, and the serious matter plays out with heart but without being too earnest. And it just feels smart - what better way to get tradespeople to think that they should buy your vehicles over others than showing you understand what matters to them. I think it’s a real achievement to have hit the balance, and to ultimately have worked at changing perceptions. At least on me.
Come on, just pay tradespeople. On time.
I know you’ve probably had a bad experience at some point. But you’ve definitely had a bad experience with, say, your mobile network - and you still pay their bills on time.
It’s not hard. And it’s Christmas.
But also do it for the rest of the year too.