All work Illustrative case study
Volt Mobility · Mobility · 2024
Launching an e-bike share app in three cities at once
Go-to-market campaign for an e-bike sharing app: positioning, a motion-led creative system, and paid social that hit the install target in half the time.
- Services
- Launch campaign
- Paid social
- Motion design
- 120k installs in 60 days
- $1.12 cost per install
- 3.4x return on ad spend
The brief
Volt had the bikes, the permits and a launch date in three cities six weeks out. What they didn’t have was a story. Competitors were already in two of the three markets, and the only thing people knew about e-bike share was that it was “the green ones” or “the orange ones.”
What we did
- Positioning. We dropped the sustainability-first message everyone else was using and led with the thing riders actually felt: you arrive faster and you don’t arrive sweaty. The line became “Beat the bus.”
- Creative system. A motion toolkit of short, loopable spots built around a single visual device: the city sped up, the rider at normal speed. One system, hundreds of cuts, localized per city in hours rather than days.
- Paid social. Meta and TikTok campaigns structured by neighborhood with creative rotated against install cost. Weekly readouts to the founders with a single page of numbers that mattered.
The outcome
The 100k-install target for the first quarter was passed in sixty days at a cost per install well under the modeled $2.00. Riders who installed through the campaign took their first ride 38% sooner than organic installs, and the “Beat the bus” line is now painted on the side of the bikes.