In the beautiful hills of central Texas, the population continues to increase and without action, so will the pollution. Partnering with Left Right Media, the City of Austin aimed to create a campaign that would educate, engage and inspire Central Texas residents to learn about and reduce air pollution.
With secured media buys across radio and digital platforms, including KUT, Pandora, and iHeartRadio, Left Right Media led the development of radio scripts, and digital advertising units that would be distributed in seasonal campaigns.
Campaign Strategy
The City of Austin tasked us with creating a unified campaign that would span across radio commercials, social media, newsletters, and websites. Through an evaluation of the demographic data for these channels, along with the data from the transportation department’s prior campaigns and our own independent market research, we were able to identify core user personas that our campaign would be designed to reach. These personas would direct our construction of voice and tone for copywriting, art direction and design, and other strategies for the campaign.
Taking into consideration the audience segment that we had detailed in our personas, we developed a campaign headline that embodied the sense of sincerity and community that we hoped to both portray in our design and evoke from our viewers – “Take Care of Our Air.”
Our firm’s open source mentality allowed us to educate the City of Austin staff members about the process of our applied marketing strategies, so that they could begin to think about their efforts in a new light.
Art Direction and Design
In designing our campaign, and in consideration of our defined user personas, our design team wanted to create something that was at once, relatable, approachable and memorable. The team achieved this by creating digital assets that evoked the tangible and textural look of paper, layered with dynamic animation and movement.
These contrasting elements were designed with the intention of catching the attention of our audience with their curious design and then engaging them with their familiarity.
Marketing Copywriting
Taking into account the personas of our audience, we created a set of voice guidelines that would unify our copy throughout the campaign. After some deliberation, we decided that a conversational, friendly voice would most effectively relay the message to our audience. Within this line of thought, we wanted our audience to perceive the City of Austin’s message as a message that was coming from a friend, not an authority.
With the time and space that was allotted for both our radio scripts and our social media copy, we carefully crafted short blurbs about reducing air pollution that sounded like they could have been from your neighbor, but contained just enough factual information to pack a punch.
Results
The City of Austin campaigns will continue to roll out in peak allergy and ozone awareness seasons in 2019, but initial reaction to the campaign designs and transcripts have been extremely positive.
The City of Austin was proud to have campaign design and direction that in their own words “de-municipalized” the city’s educational efforts surrounding air pollution. Our end-to-end approach also ensured that our developed branding and campaign designs connected across the user experience (from ad or social media outreach to website landing page) so that the user would be treated to a unified and straight-forward brand experience.