Launching Trains on Uber
In the past decade, Uber has helped billions of people get around their city. Uber is now expanding its range of modalities into travel and are accelerating their global vision to help people go anywhere. A year ago, they rolled out the ability for users to book a train ticket in the Uber app. My team was tasked with disrupting the belief that Uber is only for rides using the power of TikTok, creators and scroll-stopping ad creative across two multi-channel launch activations targeting key cities including London, Manchester and Birmingham.
The Objective
Uber is the world’s biggest ride sharing service with over 150 million active users across the globe. Partnering with creators through Whalar, Uber kicked off a campaign that not only spread the word about their new train booking offer, but yielded real results for the brand and its message.
The Solution
The Uber Trains campaign launched in late 2023, and prioritised reach and video views to achieve maximum awareness from the start with TikTok’s In-Feed ad and Pulse platforms.
Based on brand assets and creator-led videos, Uber’s In-Feed ads achieved an unbeatable mix of native-feel content and educational messaging – at the same time as promoting the 10% Uber credit available for every ticket booked. These catchy creative videos were served up alongside other content from across the TikTok community on users’ ‘For You’ page as they explored their personal feeds. Then, deploying TikTok Pulse to supercharge their reach, Uber further established its message on the ‘For You’ feed with ad placements next to the top 4% of trending content. Both elements of the campaign utilised city targeting, set to Greater London only, with all users ages 18 - 54.
To ensure they received real, usable insights from their campaign, Uber chose to run a Brand Lift Study alongside their campaign. When you run a TikTok Brand Lift Study, we create two randomised groups from a portion of your campaign's target audience: an Exposed Group that sees your promoted content and a Control Group that does not. We then use a combination of polling and statistical techniques to measure the difference in key performance indicators – like awareness and ad recall – between the two groups, which can be attributed to your advertising.
The Results
The Uber Trains campaign was a huge success when it came to the Brand Lift Study results. A seriously impressive +40% uplift in ad recall was recorded, showing Uber’s message was clearly translated to its audience. Awareness also saw a significant lift of +22.8%, proving the ability of TikTok’s targeting to cut through the noise and deliver your brand campaign effectively. Intent was also positively impacted at +1.6%, which is notable for a top funnel campaign that had no clear lower funnel action.
Results
- 46M+ Views
- +40 % Ad recall
- +23 % Awareness
- +1.6 %Intent
- x8 Top Tier & VIP Creators
