Downtown Seattle from the south end, along 1-5

Case Study: Seattle Department of Transportation

“Slow the Flock Down’”· Public Sector · Public Safety · Paid Social · Behavior Change Campaign
2022 – 2023 · Via Team Soapbox

412,000+ impressions. 62,500+ engagements. 12.6% engagement rate. Under $2,800 total spend. For context: industry ER average hovers around 1–3%.

The Challenge

The Seattle Department of Transportation’s “Slow the Flock Down” campaign was part of the city’s broader Vision Zero initiative - a long-term commitment to eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries on Seattle streets. The campaign’s goal was deceptively simple: get people to slow down around pedestrians. The execution was anything but.

The audience wasn’t one group. It was everyone; drivers, pedestrians, and specific demographic and geographic communities across Seattle who needed to see and internalize a public safety message in a media environment where public safety messages routinely get scrolled past. The budget was real-world tight. And the stakes, given Vision Zero’s mission, were higher than a typical awareness campaign.

The Approach

Working collaboratively with Team Soapbox - who led the engagement and created the campaign’s distinctive creative - I developed the paid social strategy and managed campaign execution across Meta and TikTok. My role was precision: figuring out how to make a limited budget work harder than it had any right to by being ruthlessly specific about who we were reaching, where, and when.

That meant layering demographic and geographic targeting to reach the right Seattle audiences; not broad city-wide spray, but deliberate placement in front of people in the specific communities, corridors, and contexts where the message would land. It meant balancing two distinct audience needs simultaneously: drivers who needed a behavioral nudge, and pedestrians who needed awareness and validation. And it meant using TikTok alongside Meta at a moment when public sector campaigns were still largely ignoring the platform; a targeting decision that expanded reach without expanding budget.

The creative - the “Slow the Flock Down” concept - came from within Team Soapbox, and it was fantastic. My job was to make sure the right people actually saw it.

The Results

  • 412,909+ impressions

  • 62,527+ engagements

  • 12.6% engagement rate per impression

  • Under $2,800 total spend

To put the engagement rate in context: paid social campaigns typically perform in the 1–3% range. 12.6% on a public safety behavior change campaign - reaching a fragmented audience across multiple demographics and geographies on a tight municipal budget - is not a rounding error. It’s a targeting and strategy story.

Digital Platforms: Facebook · Instagram · TikTok

Services: Paid Social Strategy · Audience Targeting & Segmentation · Campaign Management · Cross-Platform Execution (Meta & TikTok) · Budget Optimization · Performance Reporting

“Asia approached each campaign strategically - finding opportunities to maximize budgets, and thoughtfully build community.”
— Anne Luce, Marketing Chief, King County Metro Transit; Former Account Director, Team Soapbox