Distracted cooking campaign: Stay off the stove

Fire and Emergency attend an average of 4,159 residential house fires caused by unattended cooking each year. It’s the leading cause of fires we respond to and causes the most injuries.

But there are many more fires happening in New Zealand, and many more injuries, than those we respond to. Looking across other data sources (from 2013-2017), Fire and Emergency attended 1,716 incidents resulting in injury, while ACC claims from fire-related injuries over the same period was 6 times this (10,368 claims). Overall, there is a high level of understanding of the risk of leaving frying food unattended and cooking while drunk or high among the public. These are the top two perceived risks of house fire.

The issues are established. But there are still some groups that remain unmoved.

Our fire safety campaigns are designed based on an audience mindset segmentation model - you could think of these as personas that group people by their attitudes and behaviours towards fire safety.

The ‘Disengaged’ segment make up approximately 20% of the population. They are more likely to be male, young, working and living in big cities in shared rental accommodation. In terms of their attitudes and behaviours, they:

• Have a relaxed approach to life
• Actively avoid worry
• Live in the here and now
• Tend to be reactive
• Don’t recognise fire safety as an issue

Our tracking research shows that the ‘Disengaged’ don’t see the behaviour of leaving food frying unattended, or cooking while impaired, as risky and therefore they do it.

This audience is hard to reach with traditional messages and channels. They don’t like being told what to do, they don’t fear fire, and any perceived lack of authenticity is an immediate turn off.

‘You’re Cooked’, our disruptive campaign to influence this segment, was designed to be unmissable and put fire safety on the radar for the ‘Disengaged’ in a way that feels relevant - it’s not our job to tell them to stop drinking or smoking, but it is our job to stop them from frying afterwards. We know through research they’re going to cook whether impaired or not, so we will encourage them to do so safely by helping them to “stay off the stove”.

We designed a suite of recipes catering specifically for drunk and/or high chefs.  Simple, delicious, and requiring absolutely no stovetop frying (or oven use). Our recipes are the backbone of our campaign - living online(external link) and in a physical and digital cookbook(external link)

We created our own mobile test kitchen and took it for a night out in Auckland and engaged real punters to show them they can forget about the stove for their late-night feed, gathering plenty of content we can use to amplify our campaign – and our message – over time.

Year One Campaign Results

The results, measured via our always-on tracker 11 months since the campaign’s start, show the campaign has driven sustained changes in behaviour among the Disengaged, far exceeding our targets, by 2x or 3x the target. We’ve seen:

• a decrease in claimed behaviour of leaving frying food unattended among the Disengaged from 33.7% pre-campaign to 24.8% in 12 months. A change of -9pp, 3x the target of -3pp.
• a decrease in leaving stovetop cooking unattended among the Disengaged from 51% pre-campaign to 39.4% in 12 months. A change of -12pp, 2x the target of -5pp.

Year Two of You're Cooked

Exactly one year on, Year Two of the You’re Cooked campaign kicks off on 27 November, through to the middle of February 2024. The Disengaged continue to be the focus of our mahi (work), however, while the first year of the campaign was a success, there remains a significant portion of the Disengaged who are not aware of the campaign, so our core strategy is to ‘sweat our assets’ and continue to reach and engage more of our target audience.

The campaign will continue to use  channels that allow us to reach our audience in their ‘pre-cooked’ and ‘cooked’ moments – social and digital channels including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Tinder, and out-of-home, radio and bottle store media.

Click here for our campaign one-pager [PDF, 564 KB]

The concept is evidence-based, has been tested with the target audience and our people and is designed to become a long-term platform to deliver our unattended cooking messages.

Success will be measured by:

• 5p.p. drop in claimed incident of leaving stovetop cooking unattended among the Disengaged.
• 3p.p. drop in claimed incidence of leaving frying food unattended among the Disengaged.

The budget for the ‘You’re Cooked’ campaign is approximately $500k in FY2023/2024.