Check it's alright, before you light
New Zealand, where the wilderness often seems untouched, is faced with a latent, smouldering danger – one that has scorched our beautiful terrain, threatened lives and destroyed local ecosystems for years.
Around 4,500 wildfires ravage 7,300 hectares annually, and the frequency is increasing alarmingly, with incidences growing over 40% in the last 30 years. The toll on our environment, biodiversity, treasured conservation lands, private properties, and above all, the invaluable loss of life cannot be overstated.
Rural Kiwis and both domestic and international tourists displayed a combustible mix of apathy and complacency, yet they represented diverse challenges for Fire and Emergency NZ’s communication efforts.
How to reach and inform two distinct groups - those who have ‘lived here for years’ and who are ‘passing through’ and think ‘it won’t happen here’, and those who find it challenging to associate the idea of a potential wildfire with the serene views of summer holiday spots and activities with friends & family.
Ensuring the delivery of messaging resonated with the context of fire risk at the location was paramount. Equally crucial was the choice of an assertive channel strategy to disseminate fire prevention information to a varied audience with immediacy & relevance
Challenge
New Zealand, where the wilderness often seems untouched, is faced with a latent, smouldering danger – one that has scorched our beautiful terrain, threatened lives and destroyed local ecosystems for years.
Around 4,500 wildfires ravage 7,300 hectares annually, and the frequency is increasing alarmingly, with incidences growing over 40% in the last 30 years. The toll on our environment, biodiversity, treasured conservation lands, private properties, and above all, the invaluable loss of life cannot be overstated.
Staggering still, 99% of these wildfires are the direct consequence of human actions, casting a shadow over the innocence of a campfire or the spark of outdoor work.
To challenge the prevailing apathy and urge those contemplating outdoor fires or activities that could emit sparks, to acquaint themselves with the local fire danger level, understand it, and act accordingly to prevent an unintended wildfire. To ‘Check it’s alright, before you light’.
The task wasn’t merely awareness, but making the distant feel immediate and the improbable seem possible. We needed to increase the behaviour of checking the local fire danger level before lighting a fire outdoors, or work that emits sparks or flames, to 75%.
Solution
Rural Kiwis and both domestic and international tourists displayed a combustible mix of apathy and complacency, yet they represented diverse challenges for Fire and Emergency NZ’s communication efforts.
How to reach and inform two distinct groups - those who have ‘lived here for years’ and who are ‘passing through’ and think ‘it won’t happen here’, and those who find it challenging to associate the idea of a potential wildfire with the serene views of summer holiday spots and activities with friends & family.
Ensuring the delivery of messaging resonated with the context of fire risk at the location was paramount. Equally crucial was the choice of an assertive channel strategy to disseminate fire prevention information to a varied audience with immediacy & relevance.
Executing the DOOH strategy couldn't be achieved through a direct IO buy, as the reliance on historical data to predict fire danger regions could result in prevention messages being served in areas with low fire risk. Such a scenario wasn’t only an inefficient allocation of investment but risked breeding scepticism amongst the public, making the real threats appear inconsequential.
The 'Half Grapefruit' required a modern overhaul, powered by real-time fire danger data, programmatic DOOH activation and dynamic creative optimisation (DCO). One that could deliver investment and relevancy only in the areas facing immediate risk.
To acquire location-specific fire danger data in real-time, we accessed APIs built by NIWA, New Zealand's leading environmental science institute. NIWA curates a robust database of Fire Danger metrics, generated from in-depth research and the country’s most extensive network of weather stations that continuously track variables like weather patterns and land conditions that impact wildfire probability.
Each Weather Station holds a unique API key, embedded with a timestamped numeric figure denoting the General Fire Danger Risk Index at its location, where 1 = Low, 2 = Moderate, 3 = High,4 = High, and 5 = Extreme. Querying this API every 15 minutes provided our system with timely and geographically precise risk observations for activation.
Whilst DSPs routinely include triggers for weather or temperature, they understandably lacked specific triggers for New Zealand’s fire danger levels. Using the API endpoint combined with the Hivestack Custom Event feature, we set Fire Danger event states (High, Very High, or Extreme) to ‘True’, ‘False’ or ‘Null” if the values were 3,4 or 5 at screen level, allowing us to activate or cease bidding on the corresponding line items.
90 screens were mapped against 21 Weather Stations across the country, ensuring that each screen ID in the bid requests corresponded to the specific NIWA Weather Station ID associated with the API keys. Selected inventory was packaged and activated within deals, focusing on displays in regional towns, as well as screens situated in suburban main roads and along highways/on-ramps.
Results
As the fire threat heightened across the country, the public's awareness of activities that could inadvertently spark these wildfires rose in tandem. We set an objective for 75% compliance in which individuals would assess the local fire danger before igniting an outdoor fire. We achieved 90%.
Our goal was to encourage 75% of people to consistently evaluate fire danger before engaging in outdoor activities that could produce sparks. We achieved 85%. Over the Christmas period when domestic travel was at its peak, we saw a 46% YoY increase in direct permit applications oncheckitsalright.co.nz
Historically fire-sensitive areas like Northland, Auckland, Bay of Plenty, and Hawkes Bay experienced record-breaking rainfall during the summer, reducing the typical financial commitment to these zones. As a result, activity was optimised to heightened risks in regions like Nelson, Wellington, Dunedin, Queenstown, and Wanaka – extending the campaign for another two months.
Success that brought much-needed reprieve to our dedicated firefighters.
