Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die

12 Oct

12Oct

Metro Trains: Dumb Ways to Die was Australia's most awarded and talked about campaign. This campaign that was created by McCann Melbourne, he has achieved legendary success in advertising industry. The campaign was launched centred around a melodic music video featuring animated creatures who die in comically unintelligent ways, before finally highlighting that due to train predictability, accidental death due to contact with trains is quite possibly the dumbest way to die.

This campaign was created to solve a critical problem that most young people in Melbourne, Australia were doing around trains in an absent minded and foolish way. Sometimes this foolish behaviour caused an injury or even death. McCann Melbourne was approached by Metro Trains with a simple brief for an awareness campaign, which could influence the audience to be more careful. McCann Melbourne can out with an idea that had to be long lasting and ideally renew itself from time to time in order to create a consistent fan base. Since, they wanted 'Generation Y' expects to be involved, the campaign had to be interactive and entertaining.

The first step for McCann Melbourne and Metro Trains was to produce and record a music video entitled ‘Dumb Ways To Die’, which would become the main shareable piece of content. The video featured a cute song with abnormal ‘funny’ cartoon characters dying in ridiculous ways. It ended with a reference to the main point: railway safety. After the successful launch of the video, McCann Melbourne went on to generate more content including gifs and a downloadable song on iTunes. DWTD even featured on Reddit’s front page. A free smartphone game and a children’s book followed. A website invited people to take a pledge: not to do dumb things around trains. Supporting posters and karaoke versions at the stations bolstered the campaign. Radio stations picked up the song and broadcast it to its listeners.

In my opinion, the campaign was overall massively successful. In April 2014, the video had been viewed 77 million times on YouTube. The game became No. 1 free app in 21 countries including USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany and it reached top 100 in 101 countries, top 1,000 in 148 countries. In six weeks, DWTD gathered an estimated $60 million in earned media, and a 21% reduction in railway accidents and near misses followed the campaign. The campaign depicted positive and friendly vibes which any target audience can watch and admire. However, there were accusations towards the agency of feeding their egos instead of fighting the real cause.

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