Voice of a City
Eurostar
Issue 2 | July 2008
Agency
Proximity London
Creative Team
Derrin Stent - Brand Guardian;Nicola Rogers - Brand Guardian;Duncan Gray - Brand Guardian;Jason Fletcher - Designer;Joel Butt - Designer;Matt Hallett - Copywriter
Production Team
Thomas Newman - Developer
Other Credits
Stephanie Conyngham - Account Director;Maylis Garros - Account Executive
Date
March 2006 - Ongoing
Background
Many travellers try Eurostar’s cross-channel rail service to Paris once - and love it - but don’t necessarily feel the need to return to the city. Eurostar therefore wanted to increase frequency of visits. As well as getting new people to travel to Paris, they were keen to persuade people who’ve already been to return and rediscover the city.
Idea
Eurostar position themselves as ‘destination experts’. Having fewer destinations than airlines turns a potential weakness into one of their greatest strengths, offering more insights into their destinations than most other travel companies could credibly provide. With this proposition in mind, Proximity London and Eurostar developed a strategy aimed at giving their travellers a true insight into day to day life in Paris. Everyone knows you have a better time in a foreign place when you have a friend to show you around. The idea behind the website www.voiceofacity.com is simply to provide the audience with ‘friends’ in Paris via a weblog.
An assortment of Parisians blog in English about their daily lives - sharing favourite haunts like their local patisserie (with the chatty owner), the coolest bars, hottest nightclubs or a Mum sharing her views on where to take children for an ice cream on a scorching day. The site offers a broad spectrum of bloggers - personal/professional, young/old, male/female, gay/straight, singles/families, and even a small bear named King Negrito. The website is positioned as being ‘sponsored’ by Eurostar, ensuring credibility for the bloggers, but Eurostar has a constant presence on the site in the form of banners which trigger click throughs to the Eurostar booking site.
Results
Word of the site has spread all over the globe with nearly 60,000 visits, not just in London but now in the USA, Australia, South America and Asia. The average visitor stays on the site for 15 minutes and 23 seconds, and 18% visit more than once. Eurostar have commissioned two new Voice of a City websites for London - one for Flemish speakers and another for French speakers - which have just gone live.
Target Audience
Travellers in South-West England.
Our Thoughts
One of the new rules of communication seems to be that to generate interest in what you’re offering, you have to offer people something for free. Free entertainment, free advice, free information. This blog opens up Paris and Parisians in a way that is authentic and engaging and, yes, free. So much so that the Guardian gave the site a ringing endorsement in December 2006. If the branding had been intrusive or gauche, they would not have been so enthusiastic. Nice one, Proximity!