Fire and Emergency’s problem was that they were KPI’d on increasing the number of households with a detailed escape plan, and this number had remained static for over 10 years. Their prevailing perspective was that it was too hard to motivate people to make a detailed escape plan with mass-market advertising.
The remarkable new perspective came from talking with firefighters who said; “the ones who suddenly realise the importance of making an escape plan are the ones who find themselves trapped in a fire”.
With this perspective, we were able to see the potential in using 360 cameras and VR to safely put anyone into a real house fire (if you put in your address we even make it personal by showing a StreetView image of your house with smoke and flames overlayed), The advertising driving people to the online experience borrowed from the style of movie trailers to position it as a thrilling must-see. “Fire is deadly fast. How will you get out?” The confronting VR experience dovetails into a step-by-step guide to making a detailed escape plan, and we can use data from this tool as evidence that people really are making detailed escape plans. Not only did the Escape My House campaign achieve gold Effie winning results at launch (including best strategic thinking), it was a built-to-last customer experience and continues to be promoted by Fire and Emergency almost a decade later.
My strategy for Escape My House followed what I learned from writing the winning IPA paper on The Journal campaign for the National Depression Initiative (where I was fortunate to have Peter Field as my entry writing coach). The repeatable idea was a central online tool that enables the desired behaviours, with effectiveness measurement baked into the tool and all wrapped in an above-the-line campaign to drive people to the tool. The campaign and the tool were designed as one cohesive experience where the promise made in advertising “find a way through” was kept by the CX. The campaign won best international paper that year.
I also worked on Mitre 10’s gold Effie winning Easy As campaign that joined up ads for the hardware retailer “making DIY Easy As” with online how-to guides and videos, growing demand from ever more capable DIYers.
I repeated this type of strategy again for the gold Effie winning Oat The Goat campaign for Ministry of Education’s bullying prevention initiative “teach your kids the power of kindness”.
More recently I’ve been bringing this thinking into ASB Bank’s approach to acquiring home loan customers. Aligning this with their big simple idea “whatever life looks like for you, ASB helps you get one step ahead”
Carl Sarney 