The archive · Public & Social · Marketing decision · 2021
Fire and Emergency NZ sends Hollywood's fire scenes back to the script department
Real firefighters fact-check Hollywood house fires: a movie-script press ad plus warnings before fire movies push New Zealanders toward working smoke alarms.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand · FCB New Zealand
What it had to solve
Hollywood house fires are full of light, visible exits and dramatic rescues; New Zealanders who watched them seemed to believe real fires behave the same way. Fire and Emergency New Zealand asked FCB to use real firefighters to challenge the portrayals and get households thinking about fire safety.
How it works
Films teach people what a house fire looks like: bright flames, clear sightlines, time to grab loved ones and escape. Real firefighters know the opposite — black smoke, disorientation and less than three minutes to get out — and Fire and Emergency New Zealand suspected movie shorthand was making New Zealanders careless about smoke alarms.
In March 2021 the agency FCB launched 'Firefighters Don't Like Fire Movies' with a film in which real firefighters describe what they actually find, then extended the thought into 'Return to Script Department', a press ad built on the recognisable movie-script format that sent Hollywood's inaccurate scenes back for a rewrite.
The campaign put its message where movies were: warnings before fire films on TVNZ, movie-style posters in cinemas, the TVC on New Zealand's largest on-demand platform Neon, and script-style breakdowns of specific inaccuracies in press and social.
FCB's campaign entry reports 83% reach, over a million New Zealanders taking action on household fire safety and more than 88% reporting a working smoke alarm. D&AD kept the press execution in its awards archive.
Why it lands
- Attacking the fiction inside the formats people watch — scripts, posters, pre-roll — turns entertainment into a delivery system for the safety message.
- Real firefighters speaking about what they find give the correction authority no actor could fake.
- Putting warnings before Hollywood fire movies catches viewers in the exact moment the wrong lesson is being taught.
- The longer dwell time of print let the idea unpack specific inaccuracies that a short film could only assert.
What it did
FCB's campaign entry reports the work reached 83% of New Zealanders, with over a million people saying they took action on household fire safety and over 88% reporting a working smoke alarm; D&AD archived the press ad.
What you can take
Correct the wrong teacher in its own classroom: put the safety message inside movie formats — scripts, posters, pre-roll — so the correction travels on attention Hollywood already earned.
Since then
The campaign launched in March 2021 and its smoke-alarm message kept being reused, with Fire and Emergency New Zealand later building a 'press the button' push on the same working-smoke-alarm idea. FCB submitted the integrated campaign to the AWARD Awards and D&AD archived the 'Return to Script Department' press ad.
Sources
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