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With only a month to go before a critical and hotly debated Chicago City Council vote, Uber hired Joe Slade White & Company to help win the vote to allow Uber for the first time to pick up passengers at Chicago’s airports.
The powerful taxi lobby was waging a no-holds-barred aggressive campaign against the proposal and they called in favors they had build up over decades.
We knew that winning approval from the City Council would be no cakewalk.
Research showed that we needed to communicate that Uber served areas of Chicago where taxis were nowhere to be found, including constituencies of key City Council members. We then combined that message of Uber serving the underserved with an advocacy push for access to the airports.
After the votes were tallied, we were able to help Uber win the votes needed on the council to gain access to Chicago’s airports.
We did it with a carefully executed, precision campaign of targeted TV, cable, radio, digital, phones, and earned media. And, we did all this at a fraction of the cost of a traditional campaign.
Uber won a lucrative new market at two of the nation’s busiest airports, and air passengers are now able to avoid long taxi lines by summoning Uber rides on their smartphones.
It was a game changer.
After the vote Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times declared Uber the “big winner.”
When putting together our ad buys, we always take into consideration the right place to reach the right voters with the right message.
Utilizing the best data, research, and modeling available we’re able to calculate where to deliver the greatest frequency of our message at the lowest cost across multiple mediums: tv, radio, digital, social.
In Uber’s campaign, we were able to buy highly-targeted television programming we knew lawmakers, staffers, opinion leaders, lobbyists, and the press corp would watch the most. And we underneath that buy – we layered our communications on the radio and digital.
We have access to more than 600 million browser cookies and device profiles matched to the national voter file. This expansive ad network allows us to target the voters that need to see our video and banner ads the most.
We used this effectively as a powerful supplement to our television and radio buy to drive repetition with key voters with unique messages.
In the campaign for Uber – we knew we needed to reach City Hall and key constituencies with targeted aldermanic districts. We utilized cookie-matched, voter file matched digital video and banners as well as geo-fencing technology to isolate ads going to City Hall where we knew we could reach lawmakers, staffers, influencers, etc.
To be effective, radio ads can not simply be an audio version of your television ads. That totally misses the mark. Radio is consumed in an entirely different way than television. It’s a one-on-one conversation. And, if done right, can touch a responsive chord within anyone who listens.
That may seem obvious, but to many media consultants it’s not.
Radio can be an essential – yet often overlooked – secret weapon in public affairs campaigns. Carefully crafted sound on the radio can capture the imagination in a way that’s unlike any other medium. Here’s one of the spots we ran for this winning campaign for Uber.
*project completed by Lexicon Strategies' leadership prior to firm's inception.