The Brief
How do you raise awareness about the invisible dangers of Carbon Monoxide poisoning in the family home and encourage people to install Carbon Monoxide detectors?
The Solution
Tap into a child’s superpower - their unbridled imagination, particularly around monsters, film the process and engage viewers long enough to make a positive impact.
Background
Our Approach
Carbon monoxide (CO) is an entirely invisible, odourless, colourless gas which can be fatal or cause major damage to your health. It’s produced in the home when fuels – i.e. gas, wood, oil – don’t burn fully. Faulty appliances, running engines, paint fumes, and blocked chimneys are just a few of the ways carbon monoxide can be produced.
Some of the symptoms of Carbon monoxide poisoning include nausea, dizziness, mental impairment, severe headaches, and lethargy. However, to make sure you never get to that point, you should install a detector in your home. Despite 81% of people in the UK knowing CO can kill, only 39% say they have a Carbon Monoxide alarm – and the actual number of homes with a working one is probably much lower.
Our friends at digital marketing agency, Propellernet asked us to make a film for npower encouraging people to get Carbon monoxide detectors in their home. The campaign aimed to place npower at the heart of the week and ultimately save lives, but we were faced with a unique challenge – how do you create a film about something that’s invisible?
We felt that the classic, fear-mongering adverts with death stats that we’re all used to, were not only depressing, they don’t actually hold the viewer’s attention. Instead, we asked a group of children to describe and draw what they thought an invisible monster in their home might look like. Capturing this creative process on film, they came up with all kinds of exciting, spooky images which help the viewer to conceptualise the idea of CO in their home.
Results
The film plays with the viewers emotions; packing an emotive punch by flipping from this fun experiment through to the seriousness of this invisible danger. The results speak for themselves with a traffic increase of 2,124% to the CO hub on npower.com. With over 198,000 views on YouTube and 212,000 views on Facebook to date the film was picked up by the Huffington Post stating that it had a fantastically positive impact.
