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Unsung Heroes: a new era for Fire Kills Government funded fire safety campaigns are a long-standing feature of the advertising world. In years gone by they were well funded and on TV but in these days of reduced budgets, campaign managers now have to look to alternative ways to get the message across. Words: Catherine Levin.
This year, the Government has relaunched Fire Kills with a new creative agency and a fun take on the smoke alarm maintenance message. The advertising focuses on the smoke alarm, using the buttons and a bit of creative whizz to make them look like they have faces. The Unsung Hero is the unacknowledged member of everyone’s household. The anthropomorphism of unloved objects certainly has a wide appeal. And while smiley-faced smoke alarms are rather lovely, the message is simple: test your smoke alarm.
The 2016 campaign offers a stark contrast to all this. The new campaign is based on an acknowledgement that changing the clock twice a year isn’t quite the chore it used to be; with so many electronic devices in the home now, it’s pretty much automated. Despite this, a reminder to test a smoke alarm is still needed, as it just isn’t a priority on anyone’s to do list. There’s a great graphic that the Fire Kills team is using for presentations at the moment. It shows a donut shaped graph comparing sentiment towards smoke alarms in comparison with sentiment towards Piers Morgan. It turns out smoke alarms are liked less than Piers Morgan. It’s a bit tongue in cheek and it’s not obvious why Piers Morgan gets it in the neck, but nevertheless, the message is clear: people don’t like smoke alarms. It’s easy to guess why: it’s very likely to be based on poor positioning. Put a smoke alarm up where it’s likely keep going off – the false positive – then people will just pull the battery out and never reposition it. It’s a classic problem and one that continues to be at the heart of many fires across the UK. Turning this finding on its head, the Fire Kills team has gone for an approach which it describes as using ‘positive tones to reframe the relationship between the individual and their smoke alarms, and recasts the smoke alarm as a well meaning hero in the home’. Unsung Heroes is a very different approach for Fire Kills as it moves away from the morbid, darker tones described above to shifting focus on to the smoke alarm itself. There’s a wide range of creative treatment of the smoke alarm, giving it some friendly, quizzical and sometimes funny faces that correspond with the messages on the advert.
www.emergencyservicestimes.com
“The message is simple: test your smoke alarm.” The iBeacon technology has been incorporated into a sticker that is put directly on to the smoke alarm. The Alarm Buddy app recognises the iBeacon technology in the sticker through the Wi-Fi connection in the home. Once a month (hopefully this will be customisable) the Alarm Buddy app will send the householder a reminder to test the smoke alarm. The key to the success of this approach is proximity. The smartphone has to be near the smoke alarm to ‘talk’ to the iBeacon sticker. Given everyone’s general love affair with his or her smartphone these days, it’s not a leap of faith to assume that this will often be the case. This corresponds directly with the campaign’s research that if someone is going to be reminded to test the smoke alarm in their home, they really need to be near it and do it right then. Simple. This innovation is not quite ready to go live at the time of writing, but hopefully in the coming months it will get lots of publicity and be widely available to supplement fire and rescue services’ existing fire prevention work.
Impressive statistics
Simple message Quite frankly, getting people to remember to routinely test their smoke alarms is a hard sell. It’s just not something people do. The behaviour change needs to be normalised and enduring. The Government hasn’t cracked it yet and through its Fire Kills team, working in close partnership with the fire and rescue service, it continues to edit the message in the hope of finding the optimum approach. It has not been helped by the inconsistent message about the frequency of testing. Some fire and rescue services tweet weekly about ‘test it Tuesday’; monthly testing advice comes from Fire Kills and others; and then there is the bi-annual clock change. It has been a confused message for the public to grasp. The Fire Kills campaign is now focusing squarely on monthly testing. The idea is to promote immediate action, not at some point in the future. Recent attempts to change people’s habits have focused on the bi-annual clock change to prompt action. The melted clock sitting on the mantelpiece was a morbid reminder of the consequences of not testing smoke alarms. The use of shock tactics is a long-standing feature of the campaign and over the years adverts have featured burnt out kitchens, burns victims, graveyards and other dark imagery to get the point across.
Alarm Buddy continues firmly on the road of focusing on the smoke alarm. The Alarm Buddy app will be available for download onto smartphones. Accompanying the app is some technical wizardry using Apple’s iBeacon technology.
It’s great to hear that the fire and rescue service have been working directly with the Fire Kills campaign team to develop the new approach. The Fire Kills Practitioner Group and the Smoke Alarm Manufacturer Group both supported the change in tone. Interestingly, according to the Fire Kills team, commercial partners such as B&Q and Lego ‘suggested that this more customer friendly route would provide greater opportunities for Fire Kills to develop further commercial partnerships’.
Embracing new technology The first burst of advertising through the initial months of 2016 is a precursor to a second innovation from the campaign team. Stepping gently into the Internet of Things territory and the concept of the smart home, the campaign is embracing new technology with Alarm Buddy.
Clearly all this work since the campaign started in 1988 has had an effect. In 1987 smoke alarm ownership stood at just nine percent; today it’s more than 90 percent. This is impressive. It is allied with a substantial drop in accidental dwelling fires, which have decreased by 28 percent over the last 10 years alone. Likewise with the numbers of people dying in fires, which have dropped from 731 in 1988 to 332 in 2013/14. A reduction of more than 50 percent over 25 odd years, that’s even more impressive. And while it would be good to directly attribute the work of the Fire Kills campaign to this reduction, it’s just not the case, it’s the totality of the efforts in fire prevention across the fire sector and beyond that have led to this remarkable feat. It is right that the Fire Kills campaign continues to focus on smoke alarm maintenance. Fundamentally getting people to test their smoke alarms is about changing behaviour and using these new campaign approaches based on the smoke alarm and modern technologies, means that Fire Kills is adapting to the needs of the modern world. Acknowledging the smoke alarm as an important member of the household is the right way forward and a step in the direction of the smart, safe home.
www.gov.uk/firekills February2016