Carbon monoxide awareness week

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. When a fire burns in your home it eats up the carbon dioxide, which is then replaced with carbon monoxide; this can happen as the result of a ton of household reasons, so don’t think it can’t happen to you! 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 to watch out for 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.

To raise as much awareness as possible this week, digital marketing agency Propellernet asked us to make a film for npower encouraging people to get Carbon monoxide detectors in their home. The campaign aims 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?

That’s where the incomparable imagination of kids comes in. Working with Propellernet, we came up with an interesting approach – we asked children to describe and draw what they thought an invisible monster in their home might look like. They came up with all kinds of exciting, spooky images which not only help the viewer to conceptualise the idea of CO in their home, but makes it less depressing – the classic, fear-mongering adverts with death stats that we are used to just wouldn’t keep viewers engaged in the same way.

The ad closes by saying “Their superpower is imagining the unimaginable. Yours is a carbon monoxide alarm so you don’t have to.” We think this approach is to the point, and will actually engage viewers’ attention for long enough to make a difference. At the time of writing this article, the video has already received 150,000 views on YouTube and 210,000 views on Facebook in just 5 days, and has been picked up by the Huffington Post; so it’s looking like it is having a positive impact.

As part of a wider campaign, npower and Propellernet also had professional illustrators draw up the kid’s drawings.

This was a fantastic project to work on and we loved working towards finding a solution to the unique challenge that we were presented with. npower and Propellernet were just as pleased with the end result as we are, and we can’t wait to see the reaction from the public this week! Let us know what you think of it.