The Campaign

Our solution was born out of the thing people turn to first in an emergency? Their smart phone. And the first thing they normally see when using their phone: Google Adwords. We turned Adwords into a real time alert network. A system that served accurate, geographically relevant fire risk alerts.

Creative Execution

The campaign success hinged on serving the right message to the right user at the right time. We used location based targeting to serve each district within regional areas and urban fringe communities with the relevant alert ad. Using a mobile network location based targeting system and a distinctive combination of Wi-Fi and telco signal strength, we mapped out locations. This helped us accurately identify the user’s location within the CFA fire districts. We then over laid this data with MCN ID targeting which uses aggregated Telstra subscriber data (age, gender and postcode data) cross referenced with Experian and Roy Morgan data. Using both publishers enabled us to accurately serve the right message to the right person.

Results

Our ultimate goal for this campaign was to prevent any casualties in the summer fire season and provide a safer Victoria. During the height of summer, 1 in 2 Victorians were clicking on our ads. No Victorian lost their life due to fire this season and whilst this cannot be attributed solely to our campaign, our ‘alert ads’ played a crucial role in educating Victorians and alerting them to take action. Our creative solution allowed us to manage the frequency of the key fire danger ratings across the Google Adwords platform. This campaign mechanism helped amplify warning messages when it really mattered, maximising impression, reducing ad-fatigue and reaching the most users possible. CPC of less than $0.5 CPC. Relevance to users was maximised through these trigger rules, resulting in a CTR of over 20%.

This idea hinged on the use of 'real time' data to ensure that during a bushfire, people in danger received information that could potentially save their life. These 'alerts' directly targeted those most at risk based on their location, weather data and fire emergency warnings.

For the campaign to be successful, we needed to simplify the complexities around fire danger warnings. Due to the diverse set of risks posed by fires at a local level, this meant we needed to deliver multiple messages to a wide range of audiences at either different times or simultaneously if conditions demanded. With all activity being intrinsically linked to weather conditions we had to find a creative way to plan for fire danger risks. We developed a dynamic content solution which integrated Fire Danger Rating Warnings Data, Weather Alerts and Geographic Zoning. The true hero of the strategy was our ability to successfully map the CFA feed data against nine districts to serve ‘hyper’ local results. This was a complex process, which involved not only building HTML5 dynamic creative templates but creating trigger rules to manage the frequency of the key fire danger messages.