In 1993/1994, Caltrans conducted a very successful campaign named Team Rideshare/Rideshare Thursday. The campaign captivated the imagination of the traffic reporters throughout the region to the extent that they still frequently refer to Thursdays as "Rideshare Thursday". During that campaign, awareness of the rideshare information telephone number was at a high of 61%. The Rideshare Thursday campaign was not funded beyond 1994. In 2004, the MSRC Clean Transportation Funding Program sought to resurrect the Program with the goal of raising awareness of ridesharing and motivating commuters to seek out more information about alternate modes of commuting. It was determined that the orginal "Rideshare Thursday" campaign materials, most importantly the radio "jingle" was licensed and prohibitively expensive to reuse. The MSRC retained Johnson-Ukropina Creative Marketing (J-U) to develop a new rideshare awareness campaign. J-U developed a new rideshare awareness campaign entitled "Pick a day, Any Day", the theme being that "any day of the week is a great day to rideshare".
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The campaign's radio segments were professionally produced, and included the "Pick a Day, Any Day" jingle written by J-U with professional announcer voice overs. The radio spots aired for four weeks in September/October 2003, with the traffic reporter spots running an additional two weeks. The radio spots were re-aired during a two-week period in January 2004, with traffic radio spots extending an additional three weeks. The campaign also included a quarter page "kickoff" ad in major dailies in the South Coast Air District. Los Angeles Metro, OCTA, and Omnitrans donated transit bus board space to augment the radio and print media campaigns. The campaign was well received by the County Transportation Commission regional rideshare agencies, some of whom incorporated the theme into their Rideshare Week activities. The MSRC subsequently elected to bring back the campaign in 2005, updating the radio spots to reflect the new commutesmart.info website. The radio spots were also reduced from 60 seconds to 30 seconds to reflect new radio industry standards.
The objective of the campaign was to raise the awareness of commuters, specifically single-occupant automobile commuters, of the benefits of ridesharing. "Ridesharing" is a relatively broad term and includes most shared alternative commute modes, including carpooling, vanpooling, public transit, etc. The goal of the program was to suggest that commuters rideshare at least one day per week, and that any day is a good day to rideshare, hence the program theme "Pick a Day, Any Day" to rideshare. The campaign produced thirty and sixty-second radio spots, 10-second traffic reporter spots, transit bus placards, and newpaper print copy.
Pre and post campaign surveys were conducted to determine the effectiveness of the campaign of raising the commuting public's awareness of ridesharing as a commute option and, more importantly, their awareness of where to obtain information that would aid in shifting their commute mode. Quantified results of the campaign's effectiveness include the following: Significant increase in Mass Transit as a Tactic: up from 54% response to 62%; Significant increase in recall of advertising relevant to rideshare: recall of advertising that addressed commuting, rideshare, and specific copy lines about ridesharing rose from 6% to 76%; Significant increase in recognition of "1-800-commute" telephone number and "commutesmart.info" website address; "Increase in carpooling" reported by county rideshare agencies.
The public awareness campaign is currently complete and quantitative surveys have been performed and documented.