Hövding, an innovative bicycle helmet brand, asked us to do an engaging brand building campaign in London, demonstrating curiosity, innovation and care for London cyclists. A campaign on cyclist’s safety was much needed, since there is a cyclists involved in a traffic accident every other hour in the greater London.
Cyclists feel frustration in the London traffic. What if they could turn this personal frustration into a movement that would improve the cyclist’s situation in the future?
We decided to re-invent the bicycle bell, giving it more features than just giving an alarming sound. Using a simple flic button, we invented a bell that sent an email to the mayor every time you pushed it – and we plotted out the location of this frustration on a real time London map. Of course it still sounded, but now through your smart phone. Together with our partner MyNewsdesk, we teamed up with London Cycling Campaign and handed out 500 flics to cyclists.
The bike bell was invented 1877. Besides design, not much has happened to it since then. Through a super easy to use app, connected to Bluetooth enabled flick buttons, the bike bell had suddenly could plot out locations, send email to the Mayor and give a sound.
The real magic was in giving all the single cyclists power through numbers, helping each other creating a safer London for themselves and their friends. The Mayor’s office has already asked to take part of data from the initiative for research to be used in the city’s cycling safety programme.
Our campaign reached more than 100 million people through earned media. But more importantly, 5 000 shared locations provided enough data for the Mayor’s office to see where in London cyclists feel frustration. Thousands of emails to the Mayor and vast coverage in the news, made it hard for the Mayor’s office to neglect the campaign. In a direct letter, the Mayor asked for our findings, to include in the city’s future cyclist programme. And we helped Hövding moving from “only" saving lives everyday to also saving lives tomorrow.
We developed a new bike bell for Hövding – the brand that created the first air bag for cyclists 10 years ago. The new bike bell allowed cyclists not only to alert others in traffic to their presence but also city planners to danger spots and the Mayor to his promises towards the London cycling community. With the help of Flic technology each click of the bike bell registered geo-position on an interactive map available at the campaign site, tweeted a frustration-tweet and sent an email to the Mayor´s office reminding him on his earlier pledge to improve London cycling infrastructure. 
Operating under an extremely tight budget we sourced 500 bike bells, developed an app for the bike bell´s functionality, built a campaign site, recorded a campaign film and distributed bike bells all over the greater London area.
This campaign needed our prime target group, London cyclists, to actually execute the campaign themselves – by riding around London beeping away. We managed this by teaming Hövding up with London´s largest cycling organization the London Cycling Campaign. Together with them we earned unique legitimacy to adress cyclists and get them involved in the campaign. That way we managed to get 500 die hard cyclists to sign up for a bike bell and start giving a beep about cycling safety on London roads. Bike bells were distrtibuted at pick-up points, via mail and by appointment for a week. 
The point of partnering together with the London Cycling Campaign was also crucial in order for the campaign to have a lasting effect as they seek to have an ever closer relationship to the Transportation Office and the Mayor´s Office. 
We used no paid media  – the whole budget went to production. The campaign platform consisted of a campaign site and a campaign film uploaded to YouTube. Key for us was having our target group (cyclists) actually executing the campaign core and as such our best placement was simply partnering up with the London Cycling Campaign.