Greater Manchester and active travel partners
Walking, wheeling and cycling treated as one everyday choice.
An insight-led approach to active travel that uses real people's stories to reframe what 'active' looks like.
01 / The challenge
What needed to change.
Active travel campaigns tend to talk in pictures of lycra, helmets and bike lanes. For a single parent, a pensioner or a night-shift worker, those images make active travel feel like someone else's hobby. To shift behaviour at scale, the work has to make active travel feel like the natural, easy choice for everyday journeys.
02 / The insight
The reframe that opened the door.
Walking, wheeling and cycling aren't three separate audiences, they're one continuous spectrum of active everyday travel. And the most persuasive voice is local. People know their own region, and a Greater Manchester voice talking about Greater Manchester moves people in a way a national campaign can't.
03 / The approach
What we made, and how.
For GM Walking we built #thegmway, featuring real-life walking stories of local people across the region, on high-impact out-of-home billboards, radio, and a filmed advert voiced by Maxine Peake. The concept connected walking to a sense of pride, ownership and relatability, shifting the narrative from walking-as-exercise to walking-as-wellbeing.
We didn't tell people to walk. We told them their region already walks, and they're part of that.
04 / The outcome
What changed.
17m
social media impressions
60,000+
clicks to the walking website
34% → 60%
unprompted recall of everyday walking adverts