London North Eastern Railway's 'Freedom all the way' campaign introduces Eleanor, LNER's first-ever puppet brand character, built with M&C Saatchi in 2024.
ARCHIVEHow LNER Made Eleanor the Face of Freedom on the East Coast Mainline
London North Eastern Railway's 'Freedom all the way' is a 2024 multichannel brand campaign developed with M&C Saatchi that introduces Eleanor, LNER's first-ever puppet brand character, to demonstrate the freedom passengers gain by travelling the East Coast Mainline rather than driving.
LNER announced the campaign on 9 January 2024, marking a significant evolution in the four-year creative partnership between the rail operator and M&C Saatchi. Eleanor — a purpose-built puppet character produced by Talk to the Hand Puppets — moves through an LNER carriage in a 60-second hero film, vividly illustrating the range of activities available to passengers: working, catching up with friends, watching entertainment, eating, reading, and simply relaxing. The campaign's central proposition is direct and consistent across every channel: train travel returns time to the traveller in a way that driving cannot.
The campaign was built for genuine scale across the United Kingdom. Channels span television, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital audio, social media, digital display, and LNER's own owned network, with online creative executed by Merkle and media planning and buying handled by Manning Gottlieb OMD. The campaign targets both leisure and business travellers along the East Coast route connecting London with northern England and the Scottish Highlands, addressing two meaningfully different audience mindsets through a single, flexible brand idea. Clapboard scores 'Freedom all the way' at 71 out of 100, reflecting strong character-driven creative craft and broad channel deployment against an intensely competitive intercity transport market in the United Kingdom.
LNER built 'Freedom all the way' on a consumer insight that is both simple and durable: the time spent on a train is productive, social, or restful time, whereas the equivalent journey by car demands concentration and offers none of those freedoms. That insight is especially resonant in the United Kingdom, where intercity road journeys between London, northern England, and Scotland represent a genuine modal choice for both leisure and business travellers.
The strategic context is significant. According to the Office of Rail and Road's data portal, Great Britain passenger journeys reached 1.612 billion in the financial year ending March 2024, up 16.4% year on year, and passenger revenue across Great Britain reached £10.3 billion for the same period, up 13% in real terms year on year. LNER operates along the East Coast Main Line within this recovering and growing market, competing directly with long-distance coach operators and private car use, as well as fellow intercity rail operators. Avanti West Coast, which serves the West Coast Main Line, and Great Western Railway, which operates high-speed services from London Paddington, represent the two most directly comparable competitors in terms of intercity premium positioning and brand investment in the United Kingdom. Both compete for the same modal-shift argument — that rail outperforms road for longer journeys — making differentiated brand character especially valuable.
LNER's decision to introduce Eleanor as a recurring brand character, rather than relying on spokesperson talent or abstract imagery, reflects a strategic bet on long-term brand equity. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, all of LNER's brand metrics increased significantly across the four years of partnership with M&C Saatchi that preceded this campaign, providing a measurable foundation on which to introduce a more distinctive and ownable creative asset. Eleanor is designed to be that asset: a character flexible enough to work across paid and owned channels while carrying a consistent emotional register of delight and curiosity.
Director Tom Kuntz helmed the 60-second Eleanor film, bringing a background in high-craft, character-driven commercial filmmaking to a production that required precise coordination between live performance, puppetry, and visual effects. Kuntz directed through production company MJZ, a collaboration documented by Little Black Book Online and Taylor N Wolf among other trade sources. The cinematography was handled by Matthew Libatique, whose work with light and movement gives the carriage sequences a warmth and tactile immediacy that grounds Eleanor's animated enthusiasm in a recognisably real LNER environment.
The creative concept draws explicit inspiration from Fatboy Slim's 'Weapon of Choice' music video, in which Christopher Walken dances through a hotel with increasing abandon and freedom. That reference point is well chosen: the original video is memorable precisely because it transforms a mundane, functional space into a stage for joy, which is exactly the transformation LNER wants audiences to associate with their trains. The track's energy and the video's visual logic gave the creative team at M&C Saatchi a tonal blueprint — irreverent, warm, kinetic — that transfers directly to Eleanor's journey through the carriage.
Eleanor herself was built by Talk to the Hand Puppets, with post-production completed at Whitehouse Post under the supervision of Russell Icke. Visual effects were led by Bevis Jones at Magic Numbers, with additional VFX and finishing work contributed by Company Three and Mathieu Toullet. The layered production pipeline — live-action principal photography, practical puppetry, and multi-vendor VFX — reflects the ambition of introducing a brand character who must read as both charming and credible across a 60-second narrative arc. As reported by Little Black Book Online, the campaign was conceived to translate across both paid and owned channels, meaning Eleanor needed to function as a modular creative asset rather than a single-use film star.
ARCHIVELNER's prior four-year partnership with M&C Saatchi produced measurable brand metric growth across all tracked dimensions, according to Mobile Marketing Magazine, establishing a performance baseline against which 'Freedom all the way' was explicitly positioned as an accelerant. The 2024 campaign was designed to inspire more people to travel with LNER more often — a dual-objective brief combining acquisition and frequency that demands creative with broad emotional range.
No independently verified post-campaign performance data for 'Freedom all the way' is publicly available at the time of writing. What the structural evidence does support is a campaign unusually well-engineered for both immediate impact and long-term brand building. The introduction of Eleanor as a recurring character creates a proprietary asset that compounds in recognition value across subsequent executions, a structural advantage that single-campaign creative cannot replicate. The multichannel deployment — spanning television, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital audio, social, and LNER's owned network — maximises reach across both high-attention and high-frequency environments in the United Kingdom, reducing reliance on any single channel's performance.
The Fatboy Slim-inspired creative framework also provides a sonic and visual identity that is highly distinctive in a category where most rail advertising defaults to scenic route footage or price-led messaging. System1 Group, which evaluates advertising emotional response, has noted in its published research that character-driven advertising consistently outperforms category norms on long-term brand-building metrics, a pattern that Eleanor's design appears deliberately calibrated to exploit. Clapboard's score of 71 out of 100 reflects these structural strengths while acknowledging that character-led campaigns require sustained investment across multiple years to fully realise their equity potential.
M&C Saatchi created 'Freedom all the way' for London North Eastern Railway. The campaign launched on 9 January 2024, with online creative by Merkle and media planning and buying handled by Manning Gottlieb OMD. It extended a partnership between LNER and M&C Saatchi that had been running for approximately four years.
Eleanor is LNER's first-ever brand character, introduced in the 2024 'Freedom all the way' campaign. She is a puppet, built by Talk to the Hand Puppets, who moves through an LNER carriage demonstrating activities passengers can enjoy — working, socialising, watching entertainment, eating, and relaxing — that driving does not allow.
The campaign was inspired by Fatboy Slim's 'Weapon of Choice' music video featuring Christopher Walken. That video transforms a functional hotel space into a stage for joyful freedom, a concept M&C Saatchi transposed directly onto an LNER carriage with Eleanor as the central performing character.
Director Tom Kuntz directed the 60-second Eleanor film through production company MJZ. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique shot the carriage sequences. Post-production was completed at Whitehouse Post by Russell Icke, with visual effects led by Bevis Jones at Magic Numbers and finishing by Company Three.
The campaign targets leisure and business travellers on the East Coast Mainline between London and the Scottish Highlands. It ran across television, video-on-demand, out-of-home, digital audio, social media, digital display, and LNER's owned network channels throughout the United Kingdom in 2024.
Clapboard scores 'Freedom all the way' at 71 out of 100. The rating reflects strong character-driven creative craft, a distinctive cultural reference point, and broad multichannel deployment, balanced against the longer timeframe typically required for a new brand character to fully build measurable equity.
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