Lumo: Cure Your Flight Shame
EssenceMediacom UK
Launched in April 2022, Lumo is a new type of train company. With sustainability at the heart of everything they do, their raison d'être is to remove the CO2 out of East Coast travel. Taking a Lumo train from London to Edinburgh has 40 times less environmental impact than flying the equivalent route. The challenge was to get enough East Coast travellers to ditch the plane in favour of a Lumo train to realise this carbon-saving potential. Solve this challenge, and Lumo would also be able to show how a sustainable business could also be a profitable one. The ‘green pound’ is an expanding marketplace; a profitable business that can serve as a proof point of environmental best-practice, actuating commercial gains would make for a powerful case study in the fight against climate change. As a new, green alternative seeking to disrupt legacy brands and legacy travel behaviours, Lumo had to be creative to catch the eye and rattle the status quo. A travelling audience is a hard-to-reach audience – how do you interrupt someone’s itinerary when they are at their busiest and time-poor? The Answer that EssenceMediacom found was by using data – a tiny window of perfectly timed opportunity, and digital out-of-home technology to create the perfect storm of disruption to shake up the airlines and jolt people out of their unsustainable habits. The Results that EssenceMediacom achieved were national news. Sure, they represented a massive environmental win coupled with a commercial achievement for the business. But the headline grabber was how they affected a fundamental behaviour change among travellers, not before seen in the 21st Century.