Before Celtis, Omnitrans was missing out on reaching a core audience: Spanish speakers.

An innovative multicultural marketing strategy combined traditional digital strategies and effective new tactics to reach Spanish speakers and grow bus ridership. An influencer partnership positioned Omnitrans as the fun and practical way to get around San Bernardino. Celtis partnered up with Univision, the largest provider of Spanish-language TV content in the United States, to showcase one of their Spanish-speaking stars, Denise Reyes, riding the bus. Denise is a vivacious radio host with a dedicated social media following and a brilliant, colorful aesthetic. Thanks to public transit, Denise and her mother, a local resident of San Bernardino, enjoyed a day of shopping, food, and a live baseball game from the RC Quakes. The short videos were shared on Denise’s and Univision’s social media accounts and generated buzz among the Latinx community in San Bernardino—Omnitrans core ridership segment. The powerful social media strategy pairing influencer and transit ensured that all the relevant communities in San Bernardino County saw how much fun riding the bus can be.

The influencer campaign was augmented by radio spots on Univision networks. In order to complement the videos shared on social media, Denise Reyes recorded a radio commercial on KLVE, the network where she is a host, telling listeners that riding the Omnitrans bus is fun, cheap, and practical. The radio spots on KLVE generated 1.3M impressions. In addition, Univision also recorded four interviews in Spanish with Omnitrans employees and aired them on a weekly basis at local station KTNQ. All these efforts were part of a larger ongoing digital campaign in Spanish that aims to increase ridership among the Hispanic community in San Bernardino.

The ongoing digital campaign featured video ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Display to promote ridership. Since over half of Omnitrans ridership comes from the Latinx community, and over a third of their riders don’t speak English at all, Celtis developed a strategy that included customer-focused creative targeting Hispanic residents which was implemented across different platforms. Developed in-house by the multicultural team at Celtis, the ads promoted how riding Omnitrans can benefit customers in ways that matter most to the Latino audience, such as enjoying more time with family, exploring various destination in the local area, and saving money. The ongoing campaign continues to bring new ridership to Omnitrans.