Pass It On: A Woman Falls In Love With Her Train Ticket In The New Opal Card Ad
Public transport is never like this.
If you worked in advertising and you were given the job of convincing people that something about Sydney’s woeful public transport was actually good, you might come up with an idea like someone falling in love with their train ticket and having kids with it as well.
Transport for NSW came up with the $500,000 ad campaign to spruik the new Opal Card, which started getting rolled out in late 2012 and has been picked up by about 300,000 people so far.
While it’s cute, it’s also kind of optimistic considering literally no one who has ever been to Sydney has felt this way about its public transport, which was rated as worse than Mumbai’s and Istanbul’s as recently as 2012. Presumably the whirlwind romance between Opal Man and Jane Commuter ends with her waiting for him on a train station with a bunch of flowers, her face falling as she slowly realises he’s not coming because it’s raining.