Integrated Marketing Campaigns or IMC for short. You may not exactly be aware of what campaigns are considered, ‘Integrated Marketing’ but I can assure you that they are pretty much everywhere. Integrated Marketing can take many forms, with those ranging from social media to traditional means of advertising such as posters and billboards. But I will mainly be focusing on the digital side of IMCs.
Metro Trains created the “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign towards the end of 2012. The campaign had the goal of reducing train related accidents as they believe many could have been avoided. Metro had a few objectives, with one being, obtaining 10,000 pledges to be safe around trains as well as a reduction of accidents by 10% over the span of 12 months. They also aimed to create a culture that being safe around trains is not hard.
Metro Trains were able to create quite a successful advertising campaign by utilising Integrated Marketing. Metro used a number of IMC techniques to promote their message of safety around trains, but their main ones being a song posted to YouTube and iTunes while also creating a mobile game which could be downloaded from the App Store.
According to a study done on the Metro campaign by Danish Chan and Adrian Mills in 2013, the song Metro created eclipsed over 44 million views on YouTube and was downloaded over 77,000 times form the iTunes Store. The campaign was successful as 46% of their main target audience (18-29 year-olds) claimed to have seen at least one form of the advertisement. After the first four months of the campaign, Metro had gained 44,000 pledges to be safer around trains which is over four times the amount they were seeking in 12 months. Between the months of November to January of 2011/12, there were an average of 13.29 near misses per million kilometres. 12 months later in the same months, that number dropped to 9.17 per million kilometres.
Given those results, I would say that the “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign was quite successful as it promoted safety around trains in a fun and engaging way.
What are your personal preferences when it comes to marketing? Do you prefer more traditional means or these types of Integrated Marketing Campaigns?
Ian's Digital Marketing Blog 
Hey Ian, you’ve written a great post this week! I like your discussion of the “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign; I’m sure it’s one we’re all familiar with! It’s endearing to see a fun campaign that highlights the very serious issue of safety around trains. To answer your question, I find integrated marketing to be more effective, as it’s a more ‘interactive’ approach to marketing – meaning I would be more likely to resonate with the marketing message.
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Thanks Jarryd for the comment! I definitely had some fun with the Dumb Ways to Die game back when it was popular years ago, so was a very good move on Metro’s part. I agree that Integrated Marketing can be more ‘interactive’ than say social media and leaves a better impression in my mind about the product.
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Hey Ian, great post. The dumb ways to die is really interesting, as it was super effective, and a great example of reaching a wide audience, however there was a lot of talk that it was seen as more of a jingle and people werent actually taking it in a way it was meant to be taken. I think it could be argued should they have taken a more serious approach to train safety to get the message across. Overall though i found it was a great campiagn and it spoke to me, so i guess it depends on the person!
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Thanks for the comment Molly! I do agree that some people might not have taken it seriously but I also think that this type of marketing was the best way to go about train safety as it’s really not a fun thing to get excited about! All in all I think Metro definitely succeeded with their campaign.
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Hey Ian,
That’s super interesting, I knew the campaign was a huge success but I didn’t realise it actually had an impact in saving lives. I wonder if their target audience (18 to 29 year olds) were those who were causing the most accidents, or if they were just the most frequent users of the app?
Metro did a really good job of reaching a lot of people and creating a very catchy campaign. I remember when it first came out my friends and I would sing the tune for hours!
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Thanks for the comment Claudia! Yeah I was a bit surprised as well at first about the number of accidents they were able to reduce from just this campaign. I think their main audience being 18-29 year olds was simply because older adults in theory should be more sensible rather than the younger people which they were targeting.
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Nice and exciting example of IMC, Ian.
I had watched some clips of the “Dumb ways to die” campaign years ago. I did not expect that is the ad campaign aims to reduce accidents. But ye, catchy contents and brilliant idea to express the dangerousness of not being careful when going out. And it was the huge success since the message went viral and got millions of viewers.
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