Govt EV campaign fails to reach women
My analysis suggests only 1 in 10 ad viewers are women under 65
Good morning, I’m Tom Riley, and welcome back to The Fast Charge, a British EV newsletter.
Top story in today’s edition... Not getting an electric feeling? New analysis of DfT’s social media ads suggests the government’s pro EV campaign is failing to cut through to women, with those aged under 65 only making up 1 in 10 of those reached by Facebook and Instagram promotions.
Elsewhere… Regional analysis on EV interest, the cost of pay-per-mile tax, and a new project to explore EVs being used to back up homes in an emergency.
Finally, as today is my 31st birthday, I am offering a special 30-day free trial (click) to mark my previous years on Earth. You can cancel at any time, of course, though paid subscriptions do make it much easier for me to pay off Amex’s hitman.
As ever, if you have any comments or feedback, please reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn.
New analysis: Govt EV campaign fails to reach working people
Summary: In late January, after years of pleas by the EV industry, the Department for Transport launched a campaign aimed at building positive awareness for EVs across the UK. With the tagline ‘get that electric feeling’, the marketing effort is aimed at boosting EV adoption, with cost savings from switching being central to the messaging.
However... Analysis I’ve conducted of DfT’s social media adverts, currently running across Instagram and Facebook, suggests the campaign may not be reaching a huge chunk of potential buyers, especially women.
Using Meta’s public advertising library... I reviewed more than 15 ad campaigns promoting the ‘electric feeling’ campaign on DfT’s page. At the time of my review on Monday, the top three performing campaigns were all promoting a video of a bearded man standing in front of a deli in Kensal Rise (North London) talking about the range and cheap cost of getting an EV. Combined, the video had reached almost 1.2 million people.
When broken down by age... I found that people under the age of 45 made up under 9% of those total viewers.
More worrying... When broken down by gender, it seems the adverts are wholly missing working women. Only 1 in 10 (12%) of all unique viewers of the promoted clip under the age of 65 were found to be female. When it came to women under 45, that gulf expanded to one in 60 people (or just 1.6%).
Young women are barely seeing the promoted video. For every 260 people reached by these three top performing promotions, only one of them was a woman aged between 25 and 34. In short, they made up less than 0.4% of the total viewers.
