01 Dec 07

Don't Give Fire a Home - Home Site Integration

MediaCom broker innovative use of home sites for Fire Brigade home safety checks.

Campaign Background

Unfortunately there is a high complacency among the general populace of Scotland about the prevention of fire in the home. This complacency exists in all audience segments, being fuelled by a general lack of awareness in the
likelihood and implications of domestic fire.

The aims and objectives set out for the campaign were to; raise awareness of the potential of fire in the home, drive users to www.dontgivefireahome.com for more information, and to get people to register for free home safety checks
from their local Fire Brigade.

Over and above the wider Scottish audience, key touch points were required in order to disseminate this important message. Prospective home movers were identified as a perfect audience due to the mindset they would be in when undertaking a house hunt. Not only would they be looking to secure their current asset at this important time, but also ensure their family and investment would be safe in their new property. We needed an innovative way of reaching them.

How MediaCom Made a Difference

Online was identified as a hugely important medium for the house hunting audience in the 21st century. The immediacy and relevance of online property search sites attracts significant volumes of people looking to move home throughout the year. This is especially true in Scotland where it is the norm for people to utilise portals where all solicitors list their properties under one roof, hence the success of sites like S1Homes and Property.Scotsman.com. (Unfortunately none of the official Solicitors Property Centres were able to integrate our listing due to internal restrictions).

The fact that no property site had ever carried advertising in their actual property search results gave us an idea. Integration of the campaign message in to this area would achieve significant stand out as users will always check the top results provided for their specific search query. The ultimate objective here was to ensure every online property search conducted for Scottish properties during the campaign period would result in a burnt out home being delivered as one of the listings. The listings would naturally stand out from the crowd as nobody would expect to see a burnt out shell of a house in their search results.

The Leith Agency’s burnt home creative, developed for print supplements and Solicitor Property Centre displays, also worked brilliantly in this environment. Further to the awareness raising job of the campaign, the offer of a free home safety check and the fitting of a smoke alarm with a 10 year battery was used as a specific call to action. Users were able to sign-up for a home safety check either on the S1Homes property schedule itself, or by clicking through to the Don’t Give Fire a Home site.

MediaCom successfully negotiated top 3 integrated listings in to every property search on S1Homes.com and Property.Scotsman.com for a 6 week period between Feb/Mar 2007, accounting for an estimated 1,500,000 property searches. The listings took people through to a mock property schedule highlighting the effects of fire and gave users the opportunity to sign-up for a free home fire safety check by their local brigade. Further to the integrated listing, significant online up-weight was achieved by running a video MPU on both sites. The Scotsman also agreed to run site wide editorial “puffs” and an advertorial piece within the news and property news section of the site for additional exposure. Finally, 2 creative routes were set up to ensure any property search under £250K delivered a result for a burnt out 2 bed terrace house, while searches above the £250K mark delivered results for a burnt out 2 bed Victorian flat. The methodology behind this was to ensure better relevance for the audiences seeking properties of a certain value, and hence likelihood of being within a specific demographic group.

The Results

During the course of the campaign 996,478 searches were conducted on S1Homes.com and 344,394 on Scotsman.com. S1Homes generated 22,922 clicks (CTR 2.3%). Scotsman.com evoked a further 2,946 clicks (CTR 0.85%). Against industry averages these results are incredibly strong.

 However, the most important KPI lies with the total volume of home safety checks booked online over the course of the campaign. The final figure stood at an incredible 261 registrations. Considering this equates to 261 people physically inviting the Fire Brigade in to their homes the figure is exceptionally encouraging.

Achieving an overall online cost per home safety check of sub £55 was unprecedented for this campaign. This figure is significantly below that delivered by other channels and proves the value of immediacy offered by this highly pertinent online touch point.

Honours

This campaign was awarded the Best Digital Media Strategy at the 2007 Drum Awards for Digital Industries.