CLIENT: European budget rail carrier, pan-continental network
GEOGRAPHY: UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy
AUDIENCE: Millennial and Gen Z travellers, 24 to 38. Environmentally conscious but not preachy about it. Choose trains over flights because it makes sense, not because someone told them to. Have strong opinions about window seats.
PURPOSE: Reposition the brand from a cheap alternative to flying into the obvious choice for people who travel to actually experience somewhere.
BRIEF: Budget rail has a perception problem. “Budget” reads as compromise. The brief was to flip that. A train through the French countryside at dusk is not a compromise. It is, objectively, one of the better things a person can do with an afternoon. The campaign needed to make the journey feel like the destination.
TONE: Unhurried. Slightly literary. The kind of writing that makes you want to book something immediately and also sit quietly for a moment.
MY ROLE: Campaign concept, tagline, OOH copy, social captions, and short-form video scripts.
FORMAT: OOH / Social / Short-form Video / Digital
Research for this one involved an unreasonable number of films with train scenes, consumed over three days at Arabica with an amount of coffee that a doctor would find concerning. Spirited Away, Before Sunrise, Snowpiercer, Brief Encounter. The baristas started giving me looks somewhere around day two. I was trying to understand why trains make people feel things that airports categorically do not, which is a question the travel advertising industry has apparently decided is not worth asking.
Every one of those films has a scene where nothing is technically happening and yet you cannot look away. Someone at a window, or the countryside moving past them. A thought they’re having that you can’t hear and don’t need to because the train is saying it for them. No other setting does this, not car nor plane nor ship. The train has a specific relationship with interiority that filmmakers have understood for a century and that travel brands have spent considerable budget actively ignoring in favour of another shot of someone arriving somewhere photogenic looking delighted about it.
Naturally, the first round of lines were about the destination. Everyone’s first round is about the destination. They went in the bin where they belonged and we started again from the only place that made sense: the journey itself, because that is the one thing a budget rail carrier has that no airline ever will. The large window that actually shows you something. The countryside rolling past in real time, not thirty thousand feet below you through a porthole the size of a paperback. The slight ricketiness of it, the way the carriage sways and the coffee wobbles and none of it matters because nobody is asking you to stay in your seat. There is no seatbelt sign. There is no announcement. There is no rush, which is, when you think about it, the single greatest luxury left in modern travel and it costs less than a flight.
“Somewhere worth missing your stop for” was the last line written.
The campaign lives entirely on the train. Not in the city you’re going to, not in the hotel you’ve booked, not in the landmark you’re planning to photograph. On the train, in the window, in the four hours between where you were and where you’re going.
Every piece of copy was written from that position. Present tense. Moving. The destination exists somewhere ahead but it’s not the point yet.
The OOH was written for people already in transit, in airports and train stations, people who have already made a decision about how they’re getting somewhere and are therefore either vindicated or slightly envious depending on the poster they’re standing in front of.
“The flight gets you there. The train gets you somewhere.”
“Four hours. One window. Whatever you needed to think about.”
“You can sleep on a plane. You can’t look out the window like this on a plane.”
“Fast enough to matter. Slow enough to notice things.”
The social captions were written for the person who took the train and felt quietly smug about it, which is a very specific and very real emotion that no travel brand had ever directly addressed before.
“The Alps at 6am through a train window. No filter needed, no filter possible.”
“Booked the train because it was cheaper. Arrived changed. Funny how that works.”
“You said you wanted to slow down. The train was listening.”
The short-form video script had one instruction to the director: no music for the first ten seconds. Just the sound of the train. Open on a window, pre-dawn, nothing but darkness and the reflection of the carriage. Then slowly, light. Hills. A river. A town that appears and disappears before you can read its name. Text comes in one line at a time.
“You booked this to save money.”
“But that’s not why you’ll remember it.”
End card. Brand name. Take the train. Sheldon Cooper would be proud.
Want to see more? Due to NDAs and client confidentiality, full samples are shared privately. Email me to request sector-specific excerpts.
