MCT On Demand campaign to grow on-demand transit ridership

Target Audience: The target audience for this campaign was the residents of the City of Moorpark and those who work in or visit the city. The City of Moorpark is located in the suburbs of Los Angeles, with a population of approximately 37,000.

Strategy Objective:Since this service was new to the community, the team approached it with an integrated campaign and leveraged multi-channels. At launch, the city drafted creative copies that explained "Here's some UBER upLYFTing news" in a social post. Other materials – like mctondemand.com, photos, video and print materials – were created to share both in-person and online. Armed with the assets, we took our message to the people at Moorpark's biggest special events, including the July 4th Fireworks event that draws 15,000+ and the annual Street Fair that draws 5,000+. We also did bus ride-alongs, where the outreach team spoke to fixed-route bus passengers. As part of the campaign, we purchased ads on Facebook and Instagram and A/B tested different messages highlighting features for different audiences.

Situation Challenge: Moorpark launched a brand new on-demand transit service in April 2022 with the goal of offering more convenient public transit service to the community. Historically, the city experienced very low public transit ridership – only 0.9% of workers utilized public transportation to get to work, so the city launched the marketing campaign to generate awareness of the program and to attract residents to try out the new and improved service.

Results Impact: All the marketing efforts have dramatically increased awareness and ridership of the program, especially the paid social ad campaign. After the first month of the paid social ads launched, the service saw an 84.5% growth in ridership and a 91% increase in Q3 compared to Q2. Now, less than a year since launch, on-demand transit ridership has already eclipsed fixed-route transit ridership. We also want to share that the first social media post on the program – the uber uplyfting one – currently stands as City of Moorpark's most successful non-emergency, non-boosted post ever. Even with combined follower counts of around 4,000, the post achieved 20,000+ impressions, 5,000+ engagements, and over 1,000 reactions organically. People were excited about this program!

Why Submit: The team is submitting this entry for consideration of an AdWheel Award because the team felt the marketing campaign was critical to the success of the on-demand transit service and helped exceed the program's 2022 goal of 50 passengers/day. At the time of this submission, the program has achieved a record ridership of 92 completed passengers in a day. We have begun building a brand and service that not only provides convenient service to existing transit users but is also attracting new riders to the public transit network, lowering car dependency, and decreasing GHG emissions. With this award, we hope to share the success and best practices of this program with peers and other agencies in the industry.