Gone Digital – the 2022 Utility Safety Partners Advertising Campaign
Ok, first a disclaimer – no it was NOT an entirely digital campaign. But this episode showcases how the digital aspects of the campaign resulted in clicks. Not theory, not estimates, not guesses… clicks!
From a high-level perspective, the 2022 advertising campaign had two main components, radio advertisements across 43 stations in Alberta (majority of them in rural locations), and digital advertisements.
Each spring, Utility Safety Partners advertises across the province to remind homeowners and contractors of the need to submit locate requests before digging as well as important reminders to look up when doing work that may be near overhead power lines. We’ve always known how important this campaign is because we see the increased activity at our Notification Centre, we see the additional website visits and locate requests.
We’ve just never been able to prove it.
With large portions of the budget shifted to a digital campaign, we have the proof now.
The campaign itself utilized You Tube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google search ads.
The overall summary shows the statistics below:
| Impressions | Clicks | Video Views | Spend | Cost Per Click |
| 35,087,050 | 170,091 | 3,213,758 | $124,011 | $0.30 |
USP President Mike Sullivan sat down recently with Robin Eldred of Wulver Digital Advertising to get his "impressions” of the campaign via The Safety Moment Podcast.
"The way we ran the campaign we were able to target people based on their interests, for example this year we keyed in on people who have expressed interest in Gaming. We were also able to target people based on their Google search activities so if they were searching for ‘Renovation ideas,’ or something like that we were able to add them to our target audience.”
"In terms of the activity we saw for our budget, it was really impressive. We had more than 5.3 million seconds of viewing time on the website. So that’s 1,500 hours of time spent on the utilitysafety.ca website.”
On Google, the costs per click were 91% below benchmark.
On the video campaign, the costs per click were 50% below benchmark.
On Facebook, costs were 52% below benchmark. Costs on Twitter were more than 90% below benchmark.
"Overall, from a cost perspective we saw tremendous savings,” says Eldred.
The campaign was also able to indicate it reached over 750,000 unique Albertans.
For an advertising campaign by a safety organization "You're hitting the nail on the head,” says Sullivan. "With public awareness programs or damage prevention, you're essentially spraying the room with darts and hoping you hit a balloon. Whereas with digital advertising, you're hitting the balloon every time.”
"To use that analogy,” says Eldred "You’re not only hitting the balloon every time, you’re specifying what balloon you want to hit!”
Doug Downs – Stories and Strategies
Watch this 8-minute video outlining the campaign
On the go? Listen to the podcast episode