As the owners and operators of WA’s gas pipeline, ATCO run seasonal campaigns to educate the public and improve WA’s awareness and knowledge about gas safety.
Safety is often the most challenging form of communication, and in a world where we are bombarded by safety messages, we wondered how ATCO could cut through the clutter to produce informative yet unique safety messages. We were mindful to succinctly deliver a variety of important gas safety behaviours whilst retaining an approachable tone to promote the safe use of gas within the home.
As the Reg the Egg character had been in market for several years, we were briefed to develop an engaging campaign and suite of advertising communications to refresh ATCO’s Gas Safety Campaign.
With the target audience being the General WA Public, the creative needed to appeal to a broad demographic and feel friendly and informative as opposed to negatively highlighting the risks of using gas. Therefore, we were mindful to succinctly deliver a variety of important gas safety behaviours whilst retaining an approachable tone to promote the safe use of gas within the home, with key take-outs on how to safely manage any gas safety situations.
ATCO run seasonal campaigns to educate the public and improve WA’s awareness and knowledge about gas safety.
We developed a campaign that delivered important safety messages as facts (ATCO FACTOs), and by including ATCO within the messaging we positioned ATCO as a knowledgeable source of information about gas and safety. We took a ‘deceptively simple’ approach to the visuals and video animations to create distinctive imagery that, whilst not immediately apparent, often carried double meanings.
To complement the seasonal campaign bursts, we
built a year-round gassafety.com.au microsite to host essential gas safety information. Incorporated into the website was a visually appealing and entertaining online quiz, used to test one’s ATCO FACTO knowledge, providing a great tool for the WA public to sub-consciously learn about gas safety in a fun and engaging way that could easily be shared with family and friends.
The bi-annual integrated paid media campaigns ran across the channels of online video, digital display, social, SEM, radio and press to promote awareness, engagement and action and drive online traffic to the safety microsite. Mass media platforms were used to build awareness of the key safety points, and their longer formats allowed for the communication of several seasonally relevant safety messages. This was paired with performance-based and high frequency channels to tactically remind and embed the ATCO safety messages in the minds of the audiences in a cost-effective manner. Data was also leveraged from prospecting layers to segment and re-target the audience based on behaviours such as video views, click-throughs, and quiz completions. To further extend the safety messages to the WA Public, we also ran a family-friendly activation and advertising at Optus Stadium during a Fremantle Dockers AFL game.
We are in our second year of the ATCO FACTO campaign, with Spring 2021 currently in market – and the results have continued to be positive, across marketing and communications, business, and media objectives.
An external research partner was engaged to run pre- and post-campaign research to track the awareness and understanding of gas safety across the WA Public. Compared with the previous Reg the Egg campaigns, we have experienced a continued growth in the WA Public’s understanding of gas safety. We now have over 80% of respondents aware of the correct indicators of a gas leak, and the number of respondents who know that they need to call ATCO in this circumstance has doubled over the past three years.
From a business objective perspective, given ATCO’s limited investment in brand awareness advertising and initiatives, it has been a continued challenge to build their brand within WA. However, it was a conscious decision to position ATCO as a knowledgeable source of information about gas and safety, and the ATCO FACTO campaign has led to a 16% increase of correctly knowing ATCO’s service offering up to 31% when compared with 2019.
The ATCO FACTO gassafety.com.au microsite has evolved over the last one and half years, with just over 20,000 users having visited since the first Winter 2020 campaign launched. With an average session duration of 32” and a total of over 2,000 quiz completions during each seasonal campaign burst, engagement on the site has been significant. This is due to the fresh and modern microsite design that encourages interaction and play with the presence of long-form video content, a filter-able gas safety checklist and fun online quiz.
In our most recent Winter campaign alone, we reached over 972,000 metro and regional Western Australians over the age of 25 years of age, who consumed our messages an average of 9 times. The use of mass- reach channels such as radio delivered us with a strong reach to keep our safety messages top of mind. And, with our digital campaign live from May to June 2021, we were able to deliver over 5 million impressions across the channels of social, online video, digital display and native advertising to continue to remind and embed the ATCO safety messages in the minds of our WA audience.
80%
now know how to identify a gas leak
2x
as many people now know to call ATCO
16%
increase in service offering awareness
20,000+
visitors to the microsite
32 seconds
average duration of visit
5 million
total media impressions