The You vs Train campaign from Network Rail and the British Transport Police won Gold in Influencer Marketing at The Drum Awards for Marketing. This campaign aimed to educate hard-to-reach audiences on the dangers of trespassing on railways, resulting in a 5% decrease in trespass incidents and a 7% drop in incidents involving children/young people.
The ongoing You vs Train campaign from Network Rail and the British Transport Police aims to educate hard-to-reach audiences on the unexpected risks around the railway, so they are better informed and can make better decisions. Because the simple fact is, there are some dangers you shouldn’t take on, and some battles you just won’t win - and so everyone loses, when you step on the track.
The ongoing objective is to reduce trespass on Britain’s railways through communications that promote awareness of the dangers of trespassing on the railway, the consequences of trespass, and reduce the likelihood of trespassing on the railways.
Having worked with Network Rail to tackle trespass since 2020, we are immersed in the audience and the behavioral challenges. With that, comes an eye for opportunity and that’s exactly how this campaign came about - as opposed to a response to a live brief.
Having targeted rebellious anti-authoritarians, shortcutters, and cross-generational audience segments, we know trespass is by no means a young person problem. That said, they remain one of our hardest to reach audiences, so we actively sought the opportunity to deliver a hard-hitting rail safety campaign targeting teens and young adults that allowed us to communicate the unexpected dangers around the railway in an unexpected way.
When teens and young adults trespass on railway lines, it’s either because they have no idea how dangerous it is, or because they think they understand the risks and feel equipped to take them on. Stupid things happen to stupid people… If they can cross a road, they can cross a railway line – how hard can it be?!
In 2020 we worked with Network Rail to deliver their first ever influencer campaign and it proved that authentic collaborations with influencers are an effective way to deliver our message.
The last iteration of the campaign, Harrison’s Story, was extremely emotive and used a real-life tragedy to draw a parallel between the unexpected risks around the railway, and the unexpected things a young person would miss should they lose their life to one of those risks.
In this next iteration, we sought to clearly and engagingly explain, precisely what those risks are. Teenagers are lectured by grown-ups all day at school, then the nagging carries on when they get home at night. They don’t want to listen to adults. They want to sit on their phones catching up with their favorite influencers.
Please enter… Emanuel Wallace (aka Big Manny), Network Rail and the British Transport Police’s new rail safety expert – a 24-year-old science-first content creator and music artist from Dagenham making the periodic table and Bunsen burners cool again. We employed Manny’s roadman science to educate millions of teenagers and young adults on the deadly risks of trespassing.
Young people believe they’re invincible and can take on anything. We need to help them understand that they can’t take on science – or the railway.
In a series of three videos we commissioned, Manny demonstrated the science behind how the overhead power lines are able to kill you without you even touching them, used a slice of meat to show how the third rail can literally cook you alive, and used his very own train set to explain why you can’t hear a high-speed train coming. All delivered, of course, in his trademark deadpan persona.
The result was a series of engaging, hard-hitting, age-appropriate explorations of the science behind why trespassing into the railway environment is a Very Bad Idea. Young people need to understand – and believe – that risks they might be thinking of taking on, are simply not worth it – so we asked Manny not to shy away from appropriate levels of graphic description. By tempering it with roadman humour and swagger, underpinned with deadpan science, we took the sting out of its tail.
Platform results recorded 443,086 interactions, the overwhelming majority of which were positive…
This entirely organic influencer campaign delivered an extremely impressive 5% decrease in the number of trespass incidents across the whole rail network during the campaign period (compared to last year). The number of recorded incidents involving children/young people decreased by 7% nationally.
In trespass priority locations (aka “hotspots”) there was a 22% decrease in recorded incidents during the campaign period, with the number of incidents involving children decreasing by an impressive 44%.
Manny’s pre-campaign audience demographics correlate strongly with Network Rail’s at-risk groups. This enabled us to run the campaign entirely organically, proving incredibly cost-effective.
The videos were a huge success for everyone involved. Network Rail and the British Transport Police achieved seriously impressive penetration (over 4 million individual accounts) into a hard-to-reach audience via a respected, peer-to-peer voice, with almost all comments being overwhelmingly supportive of their mission. Post campaign testing found that 64% of respondents said the campaign changed the way that they thought about rail safety.
Across his channels, Big Manny earned up to 543% more eyeballs, compared to the average reach of his recent reels. Despite clearly labeling the partnership in line with advertising guidelines and placing Network Rail branding in plain view, the content was still perceived as genuine rather than a typical ad, and that contributed to its stronger performance.
The strength of this campaign was built on learnings from our previous trespass campaigns, using unexpected storytelling techniques to deliver unexpected news about rail risk. Leaning into the messenger effect to deliver hard-hitting public safety messages to hard-to-reach audiences. In this case, identifying Big Manny – not simply because of his audience or popularity, but because the style and subject matter of his content enabled him to develop anti-trespass content totally aligned with his channel, while delivering unarguable, scientific facts about the dangers of the railway.
Working with influencers has proved contentious for the public sector in recent years, so this partnership was a brave move for Network Rail but in turn, it was unexpected, disruptive, and fresh. Big Manny’s use of analogies to demonstrate the effects of straying on the tracks, paired with his deadpan descriptions was powerful – his smoldering, oozing, bloody beef slice representing burned human flesh said more than words ever could.
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