Summary
Metro Trains, the metropolitan rail service in Australia's second largest city of Melbourne, had to find a way to get young people to care about being safe around trains in a bid to prevent needless deaths and accidents. Its campaign strategy revolved around creating content people would choose to watch and share. Enter a three-minute, black humour music video called Dumb Ways To Die. Seeded through the target audience's social networks of choice, the video became a global phenomenon, and quickly demonstrated a real impact on social behaviour. This case study cites views on YouTube, pledges to be safe around trains, earned media impressions, and a reduction in rail-related accidents following the campaign.

Summary
This is a story of how V/Line, the Australian train company, used the power of guilt to motivate young people in Victoria, Australia, to leave the bright lights of the city to visit friends and family in the country. In doing so, it beat campaign growth targets. This case study describes how V/Line created a new product to advertise - namely, The Guilt Trip, a pre-paid train ticket that family and friends could send their loved ones in the city to entice them to visit. In the process, this campaign disrupted the V/Line's brand heritage by introducing its first new product innovation in over 50 years. The supporting integrated campaign not only surpassed sales targets but compelled a 150-year-old business to rethink its role in society and delivered an impressive return on investment.

Summary
This case describes the relaunch of Cruising for Excellence Online (CFE2), a programme that enables travel agents to experience virtually life on Royal Caribbean Cruises’ (RCL) ships. Travel agencies are a crucial audience for RCL, accounting for some 90% of its business, so agent training is essential for brand differentiation and sales growth. CFE2 comprised short immersive training modules set in 'real life' 3D environments in actual ship locations. The on-board experience is brought to life for travel agents through interactive learning games. CFE2 has been adopted by 14 of RCL's markets and is now available in 12 languages. RCL exceeded its UK target tenfold, and trebled its registered trainees in eight months. ROI in year one was more than 2:1.

Summary
East Coast Main Line, a UK train operator, launched East Coast Rewards, an online loyalty programme, designed to show customers what they could have gained with their 'phantom points' if they had joined the Rewards programme. Targeted emails were sent to selected subscribers and prospects. Communications and reward messages were sent to all travellers: infrequent and daily. Within five days, over 18,000 people clicked and joined the programme. The click-to-open rate was 60%. After only a year the Rewards programme already had over 265,000 members – 17% of the contactable customer base. The number of high value bookers grew 27% in 10 months.

Summary
This campaign by Transport for London needed to convince 30% of Londoners to change their travel habits during the London 2012 Olympics. With the expected 1 million additional people using the tube (subway) during the games, the system would be under immense strain. The multichannel 'Get Ahead of the Games' campaign had three phases: raising awareness; driving behaviour change; and making the change. A dedicated website, targeted emails based on travel behaviours and online video were some of the strategies used to convey the message. Despite a record 62 million journeys across the Tube network, the forecasted queues and gridlock did not happen. 35% of Londoners made changes and central London traffic was down by around 15% during the Games.

Summary
Virgin Trains, a UK trains company, employed email marketing for this campaign. The company made some changes to its approach, including a new evaluation process: the search for marginal gains focused on intense analysis and testing, studying every aspect of email performance and building on last year's learnings. The email template was also stripped back, enabling greater creative freedom. Virgin Trains also decided to focus less on generating clicks, and instead focused more on targeting smaller groups of potential customers. Following these changes, email open rates rose, as did ROI.

Summary
This case describes a campaign to revive sales of Autoliberté, a subscription service launched in France in 2001 by the car rental company Europcar. Autoliberté provided a simple alternative to owning a car - for a monthly fee, you could have the car you want, anywhere you want, whenever you want - but by 2010 subscriptions had flat-lined. With a budget of only €64,000, the challenge was to come up with an idea that could kick-start subscriptions. This was achieved through a 'Punked' style prank that towed unsuspecting people's cars away and replaced them with crushed cars. Their reactions were then filmed and posted online. The campaign generated more than €1m in earned media and increased subscriptions to Autoliberté by more than 123%.

Summary
This campaign for Virgin Trains, a UK rail services operator, addressed the marked decline in rail travel it experienced in 2009/2010 by encouraging people to re-evaluate their choice of transport. It highlighted the stressful and often miserable reality of car and plane travel and creative work portrayed travelling by car or plane as a reflexive, zombie-like decision. This message was communicated via multiple channels including TV, outdoor, radio, digital display advertising, and a Facebook game. The campaign generated more than 1m incremental journeys in total, and incremental revenue of £25.2m - a return on investment of 6:1.

Summary
This case describes a social e-commerce campaign promoting Deutsche Bahn's (German Rail) premium routes to young, under-25 year-old travellers, in the form of Germany's first rail ticket sold exclusively via Facebook. The two-week special offer was seeded via an online film that spread virally to generate 600,000 views, supported by cinema screenings and banner ads. The campaign attracted 280,000 users to the dedicated Facebook page, where over 145,000 tickets were sold.

Summary
East Midlands Trains (UK), Virgin Trains (UK), First Great Western (UK) and DSB S-Train (Denmark) are included in this collection of Warc's best case studies on direct marketing effectiveness in the rail and bus companies category.