VIRGIN TRAINS
IT’S A WONDERFUL LINE
BRIEF
Virgin Trains and Rethink Mental Illness have been working together since May 2017, training Virgin employees in how to deal with mental health issues that they might experience in their working and personal lives.
Christmas can be seriously tough on mental health. And so, Virgin Trains briefed us to deliver a campaign to help shine a light on mental wellbeing and deliver a caring message of hope and help during the holiday period.
IDEA
There’s only one place where the Venn diagram of culture, suicide and Christmas intersect: It’s a Wonderful Life.
So, in partnership with Rethink Mental Illness, we took the script of the UK’s favourite Christmas film and painstakingly painted it down the yellow lines of 7.5km of platform, beginning in Euston and ending in Glasgow, clearly signposting where people could seek help if they were in need of someone to talk to.
RESULTS
Every national covered the story in detail, as did Sky New and BBC News. With a reach of 520 million, it was Virgin Trains most successful campaign ever.
Most importantly by far: we were able to start a conversation about suicide at a time of year when help is needed more than ever. The idea is perhaps best summed up by Tim Adams, writing in The Observer:
[The campaign] aims to act as a reminder, amid the festive busyness, that for people struggling with loneliness and depression this time of year can be the toughest of all – and of the effect that small acts of kindness can have in keeping the most vulnerable away from the edge. The project also, perhaps, offers a quiet, unspooling answer to the questions that currently nag at our fractured national psyche – how will we ever bring our country back together? What are the values that we might unite around?
