Fire has a plan. This is the idea with which J. Walter Thompson Sydney intends to upset the public’s complacency about fire season in NSW. In its ad campaign for the NSW Rural Fire Service, the agency it depicts fire as a malevolent person who’s out to get you.
Walter Thompson executive creative director, Simon Langley, explained, “Entitled ‘Fire has a plan’, this campaign makes it brutally clear that since fire has a plan for your destruction, you also better have one for your own protection. The creative approach of personifying fire as a sinister force that knows exactly what it’s going to do and how it’s going to do it, was developed to make people feel personally at risk. Combined with compelling facts about what fire is capable of, including how easily and quickly it can move and take down homes, we hope it will drive NSW residents to get prepared for the upcoming bush fire season.”
NSW Rural Fire Service director of corporate communications, Anthony Clark, noted, “Research has shown that most people, even some of those living in high risk areas, do not consider themselves to be personally at risk from bush fires. Around half of those in at-risk areas believe their property would survive a bush fire, even if they had made no preparation.
“But the reality is that bush fires are an annual threat across NSW. There are approximately 1.3 million properties at risk from bush fires in NSW, occupied by around 3 million people. The NSW RFS needed a high-impact, attention grabbing campaign to reiterate that there is a very real risk for many people, and that simple steps like having a conversation can make a big difference.”
The full campaign will run and evolve over the next three fire seasons (2015-2018), and consists of a 60 second TVC, 2 x 30 second TVCs, 2 x 15 second TVCs, pre-roll, print executions, digital banners and radio spots.
Each individual element has been created to highlight specific bush fire dangers and simple actions people can take to make themselves safer.
GPY&R has developed a new online hub. The hub helps people quickly and easily assess their risk and gives them simple, clear and easy tasks to reduce their risk. The tasks are tailored to their risk profile and provide information in formats and timeframes designed to motivate them to act, help them learn quickly and change their future behaviour.
Both agencies won their jobs after a competitive pitch. J. Walter Thompson Sydney has worked with NSW RFS for the past three years.
Creative credits:
Creative agency: J. Walter Thompson Sydney
Executive creative director: Simon Langley:
Associate creative director: John Lam
Creative group head: Laurie Geddes
Senior art director: Simon Cox
Executive planning director: Angela Morris
Broadcast director: Amanda Slayter
Group account director: James Tracy-Inglis
Account director: Rachel Wintle
Account manager: Amanda Porritt
Production ,anager: Rachel Townsend
Digital producer: Hatti Apps
Studio director: Thanh Lu
Senior project manager: Renee Robertson
Production Company: The Pool Collective
Director: Simon Harsent
Managing director: Cameron Gray
Line producer: Kare Godsell
DoP: Ross Giardina
Pyrotechnician: Lou Stefanel @ Pyromania
Post Production Company: Heckler
Post producer: Georgina Selby
Executive producer: David Kelly
Sound: Nylon Studios
Sound designer: Simon Lister
Studio producer: Emma Hodge
Media: UM Digital Hub: GPY&R Research: GFK
