Metro St. Louis MLK Bridge Closing Campaign

Target Audience: The target market for the MLK Bridge closing campaign was daily commuters that drive across the Mississippi River to Missouri from Illinois or vice versa, including business commuters that were affected by the closing of the MLK Bridge.

Strategy Objective:The strategy was to utilize the temporary closing of the MLK Bridge to raise awareness of MetroLink and MetroBus services to ultimately increase ridership and get new transit riders. We leveraged full-funnel programmatic display, search engine marketing, and strategic direct digital media placements to inform and educate the community about Metro and the services offering a direct route around the MLK Bridge so that commuting would be hassle-free.

Situation Challenge: The MLK Bridge, a major traffic corridor over the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri, was closed for a year during reconstruction causing daily commuters the need to find a new route.

Results Impact: Using multiple targeting tactics such as contextual site targeting, search retargeting, geofencing, and site retargeting with a programmatic display program, the animated digital ads had 3,277,395 impressions, 3,549 clicks and a click-through-rate of 0.11%. The high impact display banner ads had more than 9,215,500 impressions, 56,911 clicks and average click-through-rate of 0.42%. Our third program of pay per click text ads providing information to those who were searching for information about the MLK Bridge closing had 5,182 impressions, 706 clicks, and a click-through-rate of 13.62%.

Why Submit: This campaign cleverly used digital marketing techniques to gather crucial data for targeting daily commuters that use the MLK Bridge. The overall strategy was successful in driving users to the Metro St. Louis website and the landing page that had additional information and routes that made for an easier commute.