VCCP's new TfL campaign turns the roundel into a title card and sells the destination, not the journey, with a hero film called The Reunion.
Transport for London has launched The Stop Is Just The Start, a campaign that sells the bus and the Tube not as a way of getting to work but as the way Londoners get to the things they actually care about. The hero film, The Reunion, follows several journeys across the city that end at the same live gig. It was made by VCCP, TfL’s agency of record, and launched this week across TV, cinema, outdoor and social.
The Reunion is a 60-second film that cuts between a family reconciliation, a romance and a musician on the way to a performance, all travelling by bus and Tube, before the stories converge at the gig. Each opens on a TfL roundel reworked as a title card, “TfL presents”, and a second film called The Next Date turns a Tube roundel into the start of a second date. TfL’s own line on the bus film is that some journeys “bring us closer to the people who matter”.
My Accomplice produced the films, Girl&Bear made the social content and Wavemaker, part of WPP Media, planned the media, as Decision Marketing reported. The outdoor is localised to individual neighbourhoods, and a partnership with Secret London points people to places to go.
The brief is commercial. TfL depends heavily on fares, ridership has not fully recovered from the shift to working at home, and every extra leisure journey is revenue that goes back into the network. Miranda Leedham, head of customer marketing, said “every stop on TfL’s network promises to be the start of new stories”. The campaign also carries messages about fares and the environmental case for public transport.
Public transport advertising usually sells the service: faster, cleaner, cheaper. This sells the destination, which is a smarter job, because nobody gets excited about a bus but everybody gets excited about where it takes them. The roundel-as-title-card device is a genuinely good use of one of the most recognisable marks in the world, and it gives TfL a system it can keep adding films to.
It is also a reminder that the best brand assets are the ones you already own. TfL did not need a new logo or a celebrity, just its own sign used in a new way, the same instinct that made Interrail sell the journey rather than the ticket earlier this month. For more on how brand platforms are built to last, see our explainer.
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