The 'You're Cooked' no-heat cookbook cuts NZ drunk-cooking — 44% drop, Global Grand Effie

New Zealand's most common domestic fires start in the kitchen: one in four house fires begins there, and half of all fatal house fires involve alcohol or drugs. The audience at real risk — 20% of Kiwis, the 'Disengaged' — had heard the warnings for decades and ignored them: they leave cooking unattended, cook while drunk or high, and switch off instantly when authority tells them what to do.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand and agency Motion Sickness answered with 'You're Cooked', a cookbook built for exactly that audience: a 'Cooked Book' of recipes that require no stovetop or oven — the two ingredients of most kitchen fires — amplified by deadpan films, social-first content and out-of-home carrying the line 'If you're cooked, stay off the stove.' The joke did the safety work: it spoke the audience's own slang, so the campaign felt in-group rather than instructional.

The results survived a national, always-on Kantar tracker: claimed stovetop-cooking-unattended behavior among the Disengaged fell from 51.2% to 39.4% in eleven months — well past the −5pp objective — with frying-cooking claims falling 33.7% to 24.8%. Motion Sickness counts a 44% behavior reduction in four months, a 7.5% drop in incidents and 2.2M+ completed video views. New Zealand's Effie juries gave it multiple Golds including 'Hardest Challenge'; at the 2024 Best of the Best it won a Global Grand Effie.