The UK’s Pothole Problem
| 211 | Pieces of Coverage |
| 3,096 | Social Shares |
Digging for inspiration
This idea was born out of a creative workshop I ran for the team at Confused.com, the car insurance comparison site in the UK.
They wanted their content to champion drivers on British roads, and campaign to make their lives easier.
As part of the training, the team were looking through other creative campaigns to see if they could spark some ideas of their own.
In this instance, the team drew inspiration from a campaign I’d come up with for another client. It showed what would happen if you printed off all the photos on Instagram and stacked them on top of each other.
The team already knew that potholes were a perpetual frustration for drivers, and always appeared in the media around the same time each year. But they weren’t sure what to do with that.
But when they saw the Instagram piece in the swipe file, the idea fell into place:
If you stacked all of the UK’s potholes on top of each other, how deep would the pothole go?
The team at Confused.com gathered the data via Freedom of Information requests, and I helped them with the production.
The story went on to receive 211 media placements and 3,096 social shares, bringing the issue to the attention of local councils, and it even got discussed in the Scottish Parliament.
The campaign earned the marketing team at Confused.com a Drum Search Award for the Best Campaign in Financial Services.
I was later speaking to the head of PR for one of their competitors, who’d been a judge on the awards panel. He said he begrudgingly had to admit, “Yeah, alright – that’s pretty good.”
He was joking. He’s a good sport.