METRO Summer of Fun Campaign to Educate Students About Discount Rides.

Target Audience: This entry was designed to target middle school, high school and college-age students who would be interested in riding METRO bus and light-rail services FREE all summer long, through September 1, 2018.

Strategy Objective:An important part of METRO's Summer of Fun campaign involved the creation of multiple youth-centric videos designed to run on both local television as well as across multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). These videos showed students enjoying fun summer activities peppered with our Summer of Fun FREE RIDE message. The thought was that these videos would give students the impetus to request their own FREE METRO Student Q Fare Card and use it to ride our bus and light-rail service FREE all summer long.

Situation Challenge: 2018 marked year two of METRO's Summer of Fun FREE Ride program. Year one featured former Disney channel star Raini Rodriguez, which helped propel the program to incredible numbers. Year one of METRO's free ride program was clearly a huge success, even with the last month of the campaign essentially washed away by Hurricane Harvey. Year two was a challenge because not only were we without our Disney star from the previous year, but we were tasked with once again increasing student ridership. Once again, we needed to push the message that students RIDE FREE anywhere and everywhere across the Houston region through September 1, 2018. And what was the most likely way to reach students during the summer ' social media and television, of course!

Results Impact: Analytics for the first video, "Start your Summer of Fun Today: The Pool" revealed that 80.7 percent of all viewers watched the video from start to finish. Analytics for the second video, "Start your Summer of Fun Today: Discovery Green," revealed that 94.9 percent of all viewers watched the video. Ultimately, student ridership rose 48% during the months of June through August 2018 over the previous year.

Why Submit: METRO most definitely got the word out about the student half-price fares, and we did it in a way that was most memorable. Plus, we did for almost nothing.