Overview.

Ola approached mag when they were first launching in the UK in 2018, across Wales and the South West. Having never been in the UK before this, they needed they needed extensive knowledge of the market and wanted our help to build them into a UK household brand as the first ride-hailing app for Private Hire Vehicles and metered taxis. 

In order to make Ola a UK household brand name we planned a two stage campaign:

• One to recruit drivers.

• And one to drive app installs, which was done in a consumer awareness campaign.

The Driver Campaign.

Specifically for the driver recruitment campaign, we identified that existing Private Hire Vehicle drivers were a particular part of the community with similar interests. Therefore, we took a targeted media approach to ensure we were reaching the right audiences with a 4 step strategy.

1. Initially, we mapped out the specific locations in London that highly indexed against the groups we wanted to target.

2. Alongside the postcode data we collated, we also utilised Route to identify out of home sites that would target people who match with the following statement:
   ‘Occupation where driving is the sole function of your job (minicab / taxi driver)’.

3. Additionally, we advertised across media formats. For these, we selected key routes that indexed against the target ethnicities, and we strategically targeted bus routes that fell within 500m of popular London stadiums, airports and stations to reach current Private Hire Vehicle and taxi drivers.

4. Finally, within recruitment, we advertised across multiple broadcast channels and press titles & placed digital ads on apps and online.

The Rider Campaign.

We carried out qualitative data research interviews with the public in order to gain insight into what people were looking for in a taxi-app and how we could then effectively reach them.

We then chose to take a mass reach approach because it meant we could target as many potential users across London as possible and the core strategy for the Rider campaign became making sure that consumers were reached across multiple touchpoints within their daily lives to ensure they were being reached frequently and with impact.

20,000

drivers were recruited in London, exceeding initial expectations but highlighting the effectiveness of the driver campaign.

#1

Ola became Number 1 in the app store within the first week of the campaign.

Growth

mag have since continued to help Ola roll out to further cities across the UK including Birmingham, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool & Reading.