The UK’s Pothole Problem
| 211 | Pieces of Coverage |
| 3,096 | Social Shares |
Digging for inspiration
This idea came out of a creative workshop I ran for the team at Confused.com, a car insurance comparison site.
As part of the training, I always do a swipe file exercise, where people look at other creative campaigns and use them as inspiration for their own ideas.
In this instance, the team were inspired by a previous piece of content I’d made, that showed what would happen if you printed 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 this Instagram piece in the swipe file, the idea fell into place:
If you stacked all of Britain’s potholes on top of each other, how deep would the pothole go?
The team at Confused gathered the data via Freedom of Information requests, and I helped 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.
