How Wiener Linien Made Climate Fighting a Public Transport Anthem
Wiener Linien's "Climate Fighting" campaign positions every public transport passenger in Vienna as an active participant in environmental action, launching in Austria in June 2021 as a film-format campaign created by Vienna agency Traktor to demonstrate that riding the city's trams, buses, and metro lines is itself a meaningful climate behaviour.
The campaign operates under the broader "Greener Linien" platform and centres on a single, arresting proposition: anybody who rides public transport is a climate fighter. That framing transforms a mundane daily choice — boarding a bus or metro — into an identity, one with moral and environmental weight. The central environmental claim, documented by Wiener Linien and cited by Alexandra Reinagl, Managing Director of Wiener Linien, is that annual-pass holders consume approximately 1,500 kilograms less CO₂ per year than car drivers. The campaign makes that statistic visceral rather than statistical, encoding it inside an original pop anthem performed by and for real passengers.
In Austria, the campaign arrived at a moment of genuine political and cultural momentum around sustainable mobility. The country's national government had set an ambition to raise public transport's modal share from 27 percent to 40 percent, according to the OECD, and the landmark KlimaTicket — offering near-unlimited travel across Austria's national public transport network — launched in October 2021, just months after this campaign went live, according to Klimaaktiv At. Wiener Linien itself served approximately 595.8 million passenger journeys in 2021, a 3.8 percent increase from 574.0 million in 2020, as reported by Wiener Stadtwerke. The "Climate Fighting" campaign belongs to that precise inflection point: a network recovering ridership and a country reshaping its relationship with private car use. Clapboard Score: 68/100.
Wiener Linien occupies a structurally unique position in Austria's urban mobility landscape. As the operator of Vienna's integrated metro, tram, and bus network, it competes for modal share primarily against private car ownership rather than against a direct commercial rival in the conventional sense. Strategically, the competitive frame is the automobile — and in Austria, as the OECD reports, car travel has historically dominated outside the capital, making Vienna's dense public transport network an outlier rather than a norm.
The strategic insight underpinning "Climate Fighting" is that behaviour change in transport is rarely driven by infrastructure arguments alone. Telling commuters that the U-Bahn is fast or affordable has limited emotional pull. Telling them that choosing the tram makes them a climate fighter — that the act of boarding is itself a heroic environmental gesture — reframes the entire value exchange. Strategic Planner Katharina Luger worked alongside the creative team at Traktor to anchor this positioning in a verifiable data point: the 1,500 kilogram annual CO₂ saving for annual-pass holders versus car drivers. That figure does not ask audiences to trust a vague green claim; it gives them a number they can own personally.
The campaign also arrives in the context of Wiener Linien's evolving creative lineage. Traktor had previously created the "Ankathie Koi – Peggy G. Reen" campaign for the brand in November 2020, which positioned Wiener Linien as greener than aliens using humorous surreal framing, and the Heinz Edelmann-inspired animated spot "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" in March 2021, as documented by Luerzers Archive. "Climate Fighting" extends that creative trajectory toward participatory energy and collective identity, shifting from wit and spectacle to something more anthem-like and communal. Austria's government target of doubling active travel's share from 3 percent to 6 percent, as reported by the OECD, provided additional policy scaffolding for a campaign asking citizens to see their transport choices as climate action.
Director Marie-Therese Hildebrandt helmed the production, with Muellers Bureau serving as the production company behind the film.
The creative execution of "Climate Fighting" makes an unusual structural choice: rather than explaining the environmental case for public transport, it performs it. The campaign's primary asset is a fully realised original pop song — earwormy, uptempo, and built around a chorus that repeats the campaign's core message with the cadence of a stadium anthem. The German-language campaign description even flags "Ohrwurmgefahr" — earworm danger — as an intentional feature rather than a side effect. Creative Director Alexander Winsauer and Copywriter Robert Wagenlechner constructed lyrics that map climate action directly onto the physical experience of riding public transport: hopping on a bus, boarding a train, moving through the city at speed.
The choreography embedded in the film is designed to be deliberately, playfully imitable — the campaign description includes a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer asking viewers not to replicate the moves, a classic mechanism for seeding participatory behaviour online. Passengers are cast as the performers, not actors simulating commuters, which aligns the visual language with the campaign's core proposition: these are real climate fighters, not archetypes. The hashtag ecosystem — including #climatefighting, #öffisnützenklimaschützen (public transport users protect the climate), and #bestefahrgemeinschaft (best travel community) — was built into the campaign architecture from launch, directing audiences from the film to a dedicated landing page at wienerlinien.at/greenerlinien for the full Greener Linien climate facts. The result is a piece of creative work that uses the grammar of a music video to deliver an environmental message with the stickiness of a pop hit rather than the earnestness of a public information film.
The "Climate Fighting" campaign generated approximately 139,924 views, 393 likes, and 145 comments as recorded in Clapboard's archive. While these figures reflect organic engagement on the campaign's primary video asset, they do not represent the full reach of a campaign that also operated across social channels under multiple hashtags and connected to a dedicated Greener Linien platform.
The campaign achieved a Creative Club Austria Shortlist recognition, as documented by Creativclub At, which represents a meaningful indicator of creative industry standing in the Austrian market. No verified wins across Cannes Lions or equivalent international award bodies are publicly documented for this campaign.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several hallmarks of effective behaviour-change communication. It attaches a specific, credible data point — the 1,500 kilogram CO₂ saving — to a memorable emotional and sonic hook, reducing the cognitive distance between information and identity shift. The music-video format is inherently shareable and platform-native, while the hashtag framework creates a measurable trail of participation. Wiener Linien's overall ridership grew 3.8 percent to approximately 595.8 million journeys in 2021, as reported by Wiener Stadtwerke, a figure that reflects the network's recovery trajectory during the period in which this campaign was active. Attributing ridership growth directly to a single campaign would not be methodologically sound, but the campaign's launch timing — preceding the October 2021 KlimaTicket by several months — positioned Wiener Linien as a cultural and environmental leader at a moment when public transport became a national policy priority in Austria, according to klimaaktiv.at.
The Climate Fighting campaign is a 2021 Austrian public transport film by Wiener Linien and Vienna agency Traktor. Launched in June 2021 under the broader Greener Linien platform, it uses an original pop anthem to position public transport passengers as climate fighters, anchored by the claim that annual-pass holders save approximately 1,500 kilograms of CO₂ per year compared to car drivers.
Traktor, a Vienna-based agency, created the Climate Fighting campaign for Wiener Linien. The core team included Creative Director Alexander Winsauer, Copywriter Robert Wagenlechner, and Strategic Planner Katharina Luger. Director Marie-Therese Hildebrandt led production through production company Muellers Bureau, bringing the campaign's original pop anthem to screen.
The campaign claims that Wiener Linien annual-pass holders consume approximately 1,500 kilograms less CO₂ per year than car drivers. This figure was cited by Wiener Linien Managing Director Alexandra Reinagl and forms the factual backbone of the campaign's Climate Fighter identity, translating a statistical saving into a personal environmental achievement for every public transport rider in Vienna.
The Climate Fighting film recorded approximately 139,924 views, 393 likes, and 145 comments, as documented in Clapboard's archive. The campaign also achieved a Creative Club Austria Shortlist recognition, as documented by creativclub.at. No verified international award wins are publicly documented for the campaign across bodies such as Cannes Lions.
Climate Fighting is part of Wiener Linien's Greener Linien platform, which frames public transport use as environmental action. It follows earlier Traktor-created work including the surreal November 2020 Ankathie Koi campaign and the March 2021 animated spot Wouldn't It Be Nice?, representing a shift toward participatory, anthem-driven creative that invites Austrian commuters into a collective climate identity.
Austria's national government was targeting an increase in public transport's modal share from 27 percent to 40 percent, according to the OECD. The KlimaTicket, offering near-unlimited national public transport travel, launched in October 2021, according to klimaaktiv.at, just months after the campaign. Wiener Linien recorded approximately 595.8 million passenger journeys in 2021, as reported by Wiener Stadtwerke.
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