The challenge
Even with an early warning from smoke alarms, you have just a couple of minutes to get out of a house fire before it becomes unsurvivable. In the toxic black smoke, instincts fail you and your house becomes foreign in the blackness. Having a simple plan to escape your house means you are all much more likely to make it out alive, especially if you have young children or other dependents that need help to get out too. Having an agreed safe meeting place means there is no doubt as to whether everyone is out.
The target audience
Focusing on where our efforts can make the most difference, the campaign is designed to shift the beliefs and actions of a specific audience mindset, the ‘Intenders’. Our public tracking data tells us that the incidence of escape plans among the homes of Intenders is well below average (36% vs 60% average in Q4 21/22).
Escape plans are most important in households where there are dependants, either young or old, and the Intenders are more likely to have a young family and may also have parents that might need support (whether they live with them or not). They tend to be busy parents running busy households. They have the best intentions to keep their whānau safe, but they just don’t get around to making an escape plan.
To ensure more New Zealand households have quality escape plans, we want people to act and to see that being prepared to protect their family in a house fire is easy and can’t stay on the ‘to-do’ list.
Our approach
Creating a Mahere Rerenga Tāwhai-3 | 3-Step-Escape Plan is easy.
Our simple formula breaks down escape planning to the three most important steps, makes it clear what a quality escape plan needs to include and helps people see that creating an escape plan is easy and doable for all. You just need to know:
- First escape route
- Second escape route
- Meeting place
Three minutes is all a house fire needs to kill. Three minutes is all you need to save a life.
Making an escape plan only takes three minutes, so the campaign leans into the time it takes to make an escape plan and shows that 3 minutes really isn’t that long.
The campaign creative features a clock, counting down from three minutes, to create a sense of urgency to make an escape plan. While the clock counts down, we also see a fire developing in the background. In just three minutes, we see the fire grow from a small flame at the side of the couch, to a fully developed fire that would be unsurvivable.
Our media plan is designed to intercept people at moments when they might have three minutes to create their escape plan, such as during the TV ad break or while sitting at the bus stop.
The campaign launched on 19 February 2023 and is led by our video ads. These will be played across the ad break on television in three, five-second clips showing the fire at different stages and times.
Alongside the video assets, there are also radio, social and out-of-home placements to encourage people to take just three minutes to make their own escape plan and save a life.
We welcome our partners to re-share our social content through their own channels.
For more information and to create an escape plan visit: www.escapemyhouse.co.nz(external link)
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