Keeping 2-wheelers moving with Google Maps

Challenge: Connecting with motorcycles, mopeds and beyond

Google Maps is the preferred navigation GPS app that’s native to all Android phones. While it enjoys healthy usage across the world, Indonesia was a different story. Most drivers of four-wheel vehicles prefer Google Maps for navigating and checking traffic, but on the roads near Jakarta they were outnumbered.

Due to impenetrably dense city traffic, Indonesia is the third biggest 2-wheeler market in world. With over six million 2-wheeler vehicles sold annually, the needs of motorcycle, moped and scooter users were unmet. Knowing this, we wanted to launch a new 2W feature of Google Maps that would be hyper relevant to them.

With this in mind, we targeted 2W users across the greater Jakarta-Jabodetabek metropolitan area as traffic is a major problem that causes frequent standstills.

Approach: Transforming standstills into opportunities

After conducting in-depth interviews across the Jabodetabek area, we found that driving a 2-wheeler on city roads was actually a better experience than driving a 4-wheeler. However, a peculiar pain-point stood out that only 2-wheeler riders reported -- things get really painful in Jakarta traffic the moment your bike/scooter stops being in motion.

Drivers revealed that all of the city’s ills--pollution, feeling claustrophobic, rain and extreme heat--affect you the most when you’re halted in the middle of a commute. Above all, the bikers wanted to keep moving to avoid these pain points. In fact, they reported that they would rather make a longer journey where they know they could stay in motion, instead of a shorter one with multiple stops. This informed our strategic approach to empathise with the 2W user when they are stuck and give them an escape plan.

From a media strategy standpoint, we wanted to be as contextual as possible. We took into account the scaling of the campaign and focused on relevant touchpoints, targeting users wherever they had the highest likelihood of being stuck in traffic.

Through deep research, we analysed drivers’ location, typical commute time, locations prone to traffic jams, and more. Using the power of data to drive relevance of the 2W feature, we showed drivers how Google Maps can act as a get-out-of-traffic card for drivers based on location, weather, traffic and time of day. In parallel, there was massive OOH support on key traffic-jammed locations across the greater Jakarta region to promote relevance and mass awareness.

High-octane results

The Google Maps 2W campaign overachieved all targets, showing a crowded metro area how to better escape traffic. Compared to the target of gaining 50% awareness, we were able to gain 95% awareness in the 2W segment--a staggering leap. Additionally, we gained 7% incremental Daily Active Users with the new 2W feature, reaching over 40 million Indonesian bikers in the process.

The campaign used many contextual levers and was highly data driven in an effort to be as relevant as possible--at the precise moment they experience pain points. Each piece of mobile creative deep-linked to the user’s location, so when they clicked any of our campaign assets, they were taken to the 2W mode on Google Maps, showing their exact location with the new interface. This made the acts not only relatable, but also highly useful.