North Texas Tollway Authority
The North Texas Tollway Authority is an organization that maintains over 1,000 miles of toll lanes across the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. Like many other toll companies, they offer a small sticker you can affix to your windshield called a TollTag that lets drivers pay half as much as someone paying via the traditional ticket by mail method.
The Strategy
As you can imagine, people aren’t exactly overflowing with positive sentiments towards a toll road company; they don’t trust the NTTA and definitely don’t like being charged money just for driving. Our goal wasn’t to get people to love us or even like us, just to hate us less.
To humanize the organization, we created the “Word of Mouth” campaign, which dropped the audience into conversations that used naturalistic dialogue, like something you’d overhear at dinner or while waiting in line… only difference was that puppets were the ones having these conversations.
Partnering with Swazzle, an LA company that builds professional-quality foam and fleece custom puppets, we created a slew of goofy characters and scenarios that allowed us to disarm the audience with a laugh and then tell them that a TollTag can cut their bill in half. This message was delivered in TV spots, social media, radio, OOH, digital banners, and direct mailers.
TV
After a few years of Word of Mouth spots mostly grounded in reality, we started to lean further into genre pastiches like the telenovela spot above. After the client saw how fun (and successful) this approach was, they allowed us to do even more specific spots. I was lucky enough to write a horror-themed spot for the Halloween season and even a music video that radiates main pop girlie energy and was so catchy it got us some earned media.
Social
In social (and OOH, and pretty much every other medium) we paired our storytelling back in order to deliver the essential core message that signing up for a TollTag cuts your bill in half.
TollPerks Radio
An extension of our campaign, NTTA also tasked us with creating radio and social for TollPerks, a rewards program that TollTag owners can use to get free rewards and savings around the Metroplex. Everything from coffee and dinner to free rounds of laser tag are on the table, so we created spots showcasing different “Perksonas,” the zany people around Dallas Fort Worth who go all out with their TollPerks.
Outdoor
And, of course, we wanted to meet the drivers where they were: on the road. We utilized our most striking visuals and our quickest headlines to convey the message that anyone driving by could cut their toll bill in half.
