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Bord Iascaigh Mhara: Live to Tell the Tale

DDFH&B

BRONZE

BRONZE

PUBLIC SERVICE, SOCIAL WELFARE & EDUCATION

SMALL BUDGETSponsored by

AWARDS

The DDFH&B Group consists of DDFH&B Advertising, Goosebump, The Reputations Agency, RMG and Mindshare Media – making it one of the largest Irish companies in creative advertising, media buying and customer relationship/digital marketing. Together, they provide channel-neutral, integrated marketing communications campaigns that deliver real, measurable results. They achieve this level of integration by working in a number of small, multi-disciplined teams, calling it ‘fun sizing’. They continue to be one of the most successful agencies in Ireland, working with clients such as Kerry Foods, SuperValu, The National Lottery, eir, Littlewoods, Lucozade and Molson Coors.

COMPANY PROFILEAGENCY

CLIENT

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Fishing is universally acknowledged as one of the most hazardous professions in the world.[i]

According to the HSA (Health and Safety Authority in Ireland), fishing is 13 times more dangerous than construction and 36 times more dangerous than general employment.

The average Irish fisherman encounters four to five near misses each year[ii]. In Ireland, 53 fishermen have died over the last 10 years – a fatality rate that is 69% higher than in the UK[iii] - and most of them weren’t wearing any Personal Flotation Device (PFD)[iv].

There is only so much that can be done to prevent a fisherman from going overboard and only one thing that can save them once in the water – their PFD.

The reason for this is that immersion in cold water rapidly incapacitates and can kill even the best swimmers. A prior accident on deck could also mean a fisherman is already unconscious or physically impaired when they hit the water.

The latest PFDs have an integrated Personal Locator Beacon (PLB), which uses GPS technology to alert the nearest coastguard rescue team, pinpointing the exact location of the fisherman in difficulty, and further increasing their chance of being found.

That’s why BIM[v] decided to make these PFDs the subject of its first ever national campaign.

Unlike Seafish, its UK equivalent, BIM do not offer its fishermen free PFDs by getting them to register on their website. BIM want to ensure fishermen are trained and know how to use PFDs correctly, so it provides training at the subsidised rate of €155. Once training is complete, a voucher is given to fishermen to avail of the new compact PFD.

INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND

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Although small in scale, the importance of this campaign goes way beyond PFD promotion. Under Food Wise 2025[vi] and Origin Green[vii], Ireland wants to become a global leader in seafood by 2020 by increasing revenue from €810m to €1b and the numbers employed by 27%.

Key to achieving all this is having a professional fishing industry trained to the highest international safety standards that is capable of attracting and keeping the highest calibre people.

[i] Fishing is ranked no. 2 out of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the world by Mission Safety Services – the no. 1 industry safety services consultancy in Canada. (Figure 6.)

[ii] Source: BIM

[iii] Factoring in the relative populations of fishermen in each country, the fatality rate per 1,000 fishermen is 13.2 in Ireland (53 over the last 10 years out of a fishing population of 4,000 according to BIM) versus 7.8 in the UK (94 over the last 10 years out of a fishing population of 12,000 according to Seafish) – i.e. 69% higher per 1000 fishermen in Ireland than in the UK.

[iv] A PFD is a generic term used to describe both lifejackets and inflatable buoyancy aids. The primary difference between a lifejacket and buoyancy aid is that a lifejacket is designed to turn an unconscious person face up on entering the water, whereas the buoyancy aid is just an aid to staying afloat and will not turn the wearer the right way up or keep the head clear of the water.

Lifejackets are reserved for abandon ship scenarios. They’re too bulky to be worn whilst working on deck so they’re stored safely out of the way until they’re needed and are obviously only of use if there is sufficient prior warning of danger and time to put them on.

PFDs are compact and designed to be worn all of the time because accidents happen when you least expect them to. Each one has an inflatable lifejacket, beacon and light, which are only activated the moment someone hits the water.

[v] BIM is a non commercial state government agency responsible for the development of the Irish Seafood Sector in Ireland.

[vi] Food Wise 2025 is the Irish Government’s strategic vision for agriculture, food and fishing industry.


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[vii] Origin Green places sustainability at the core of the Irish food and drink industry. It is the only sustainability programme in the world which operates on a national scale, uniting government, the private sector and food producers, through Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGvKoz8FP5o

With the global population projected to increase by more than 2.4 billion people by 2050, the world will need to produce up to twice as much food from increasingly limited resources. This is leading to long term fears over the security of food supplies in many parts of the world.

Sustained pressure on the world’s already strained resources is also being exacerbated by the ongoing challenges presented by climate change and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. In order to meet these challenges, it will require everyone involved in the food industry to produce more from less, which necessitates the adoption of more sustainable practices. This is the backdrop that led to the launch of Origin Green in 2012.


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Commercial Objective

BIM is a non commercial state government agency responsible for the development of the Irish Seafood Sector. One of its most important responsibilities is to provide mandatory safety training to fishermen to reduce fatalities at sea and do so at minimum cost.

The new PLB enabled PFD costs €330 but if a fisherman completes BIM’s Enhanced Safety Training course, not only are they more likely to understand the need for wearing one and how to wear one correctly, they effectively get one at a highly discounted price of €155, a saving of €175 per PFD.

Given that most fishermen have already completed basic safety training, our commercial KPI was to increase the number of fishermen signing up for Enhanced Safety Training by 15%.

Marketing Objective

Our long-term objective was to develop and promote a culture whereby fishermen automatically wear the new PFD lifejackets when going to sea, thereby reducing fatalities.

We were acutely aware from the outset that there is a difference between claimed and actual behaviour, so we advised BIM to carry out an observational study pre and post campaign to supplement the pre and post tracking study on claimed attitudes and behaviour which they had already commissioned.

Unfortunately there were neither the time nor the resources for BIM to organise this between when we were awarded the business in November 2015 and when we had to be into campaign in January 2016.

MARKETING OBJECTIVES

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Claimed or otherwise, affecting behaviour change takes time. It’s a process, not an event, so we used the Stages of Change model to set our marketing objectives for year 1.

Our research to date suggested that fishermen were already at the “contemplation” stage of PFD wearing and some were already in possession of a new compact PFD, but hadn’t yet committed to wearing it.

Our marketing objective was therefore to move our fishermen from the “contemplation” to the “preparation” stage in the first 6 months and onto the “action” stage within 12 months, recognising that long term success would crucially depend on regular and visible enforcement of mandatory PFD wearing – none of which currently exists, despite PFD wearing being mandatory for all working fishermen on deck.

Our marketing KPIs were therefore to:

increase understanding of and appreciation for the life-saving properties of PLB enabled PFDs; increase the proportion of fishermen wearing these PFDs; and increase the frequency of PFD wearing in general.

Role of Advertising

We felt that advertising was uniquely placed to help us realise our commercial and marketing objectives by creating a chink in fishermen’s mental safety chain that only PFDs could fill, in a way that prevented them from opting out.

We knew that our advertising would have to emotionally connect, not just with fishermen as the real safety at sea experts, but with their families and friends too as key influencers on their behaviour.

MARKETING OBJECTIVES

Figure 1. Stages of Change Model

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This was no ordinary advertising challenge. We were being asked to create a new safety at sea norm amongst a group of people most of whom:

had avoided wearing PFDs in the absence of any clear and present danger for the whole of their working lives, and

considered themselves to be the only authority on how to stay safe at sea and were therefore highly sceptical about taking safety advice from people outside of their inner circle. As one fisherman put it:

“What do the health and safety officers with their clipboards know about the realities of our world?”

In fact, fishermen argue that certain regulations can actually put them in more danger:

“The fear of losing your quota at the end of a month of bad weather can cause fishermen to take chances they shouldn’t”.

There was every chance that no matter which approach we took, the fishermen would dismiss what we said or how we said it as lacking in credibility or relevance to them.

We were being asked to create a new social norm in the absence of any legal enforcement. Fishermen know that no-one is in charge of enforcing mandatory wearing of PFDs. As one fishermen commented:

“If PFDs are so important, why don’t the navies check we’re wearing them when they inspect our boats and impose the €100 fine?”

THE TASK

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Despite the vast amount of advertising money spent over the years trying to educate smokers and drink drivers to change their unsafe behaviours, it took the introduction of the smoking ban and regular breathaliser testing to dramatically change behaviour and the social climate around both issues.

Imagine then the scale of our task.

We had neither the benefit of legal enforcement nor advertising heritage to help us. We knew that 1 in 2 fishermen have direct experience of losing someone they know at sea, but this still makes them no more likely to wear their PFDs.[i]

Why were the very people at the coalface of all this suffering - the ones who usually volunteer to participate in searches for fellow fishermen - still not wearing their PFDs as often as they know they should?

Our start point to begin answering some of these questions was the quantitative study BIM had commissioned in May of 2015, where the main reasons cited for not wearing PFDs outside of safety zones was that they were cumbersome and hot in warm weather.

They struck us as remarkably similar to the kind of excuses previously cited by Irish motorists for not wearing their seat-belts. We needed to delve deeper into why fishermen are prepared to let a little inconvenience stand between them and their chances of coming home safe.

[i] B&A benchmarking study, May 2015

THE TASK

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Our strategy was informed by pierside qualitative research we undertook at our own expense in Howth amongst 8 fishermen, none of whom regularly wore their PFDs whilst working on deck and one of whom almost drowned because of this.

We made a point of talking to them whilst they worked on their trawlers on a day that wasn’t suited to going to sea, when they were at their most relaxed and willing to engage with us.

We discovered that the definition of a good seaman is one who manages to stay out of the water - that wearing your PFD signals at some subliminal level that you’re expecting to use it and are therefore not much of a seaman to begin with.[i]

Whilst fishermen never expect to end up in the water, they fully accept that anything can happen at sea and feel an enormous responsibility to bring any “visitors” home safe. It’s the one time they always wear their PFDs.

Safety matters to fishermen but staying safe for them means staying “the hell out of the water” , so they prioritise the things that are going to keep them afloat, like their boat’s engine and stability.

PFDs can’t avert disaster if disaster is ending up in the water.

There was lots of banter about near misses amongst the fishermen we spoke to, with each one trying to outdo the other. Their stories may have been exchanged with a certain amount of humour and pride but we detected an underlying unease.

On further probing they admitted that their greatest fear was being lost at sea forever. If they were going to die in the water, it was vitally important to fishermen that their families found their bodies.

THE STRATEGY

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At the same time, we were taken aback at how few fishermen can actually swim and at how fatalistic some of them appear to be about surviving a fall into the water: “What’s the point of a PFD when it’s the sea that will decide?”

Our strategy was therefore twofold:

Broaden fishermen’s definition of safety from “staying out of the water” to “staying safe once you’re in it”, thereby legitimising a PFD’s place in their safety equation.

Reframe the benefit of wearing PFDs from “saving their lives” to “reuniting them dead or alive with their families”.

[i] Just as construction workers used to resist being seen wearing their hard hats on site, fishermen struggle a little right now with being seen wearing a PFD when there are no obvious signs of danger. It goes against the “hard man” image.

THE STRATEGY

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We uncovered an uncomfortable truth in our desk research that gave a whole new meaning to the term “lost at sea”. Most fishermen who died at sea weren’t wearing any PFD with the result that their bodies were only recovered in a quarter of cases .[i]

This has traumatic and far-reaching consequences for the families of these victims. Without a body, they can’t have a funeral. Without a body, they can’t close a bank account, make a life insurance claim or settle a will for 7 years.

We appreciated that this was gruesome territory but felt that we had to go there. The only question in our minds was how best to go about it. We developed three creative routes for formal qualitative testing by B&A.[ii]

“Live to tell the tale” – inspired by the fact that dead men don’t tell tales and fishermen are full of stories of near misses on the boat – was the clear winner.

It acknowledged that while staying on the boat is the most important safety advice but that PFDs are the only thing other than blind luck that will save you if you go overboard.

Alluding to family and the importance of being found (even if you don’t make it) was dealt with in the most appropriate way here – enough to act as a trigger to action but without over-egging the emotional blackmail.

The narrative was immediately understood and the “last thoughts” as the fisherman went overboard really struck a chord, as did the reference to David Massey (who owes his life to the fact he was wearing his PFD on April 15th 2015 when he hit the water). This grounded the route in reality and gave it instant credibility.

THE IDEA AND COMMUNICATIONS ACTIVITY

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The line “Live to tell the tale” was widely liked, well known and tallied with fishermen’s experiences of exchanging stories of near misses. It also put a positive spin on what could otherwise have been a downbeat message.

Media strategy and creative execution[iii]

A total of €79,653 (excluding VAT @ 23%) was spent on media following the PR launch on 18th January over a period of four weeks. January was chosen because it’s statistically the most dangerous month for inshore fishermen, and also because it’s conducive to new habit formation.

Mindshare’s channel selection was largely informed by B&A’s quantitative research into fishermen’s media habits, which highlighted the primacy of radio as a medium, the importance of regional over national press, the influence exerted by dedicated fishing magazines and high levels of live TV watching.

Our creative idea was therefore brought to life in these media as well as in highly targeted outdoor. Whilst we recognised the opportunity for mobile advertising, we didn’t have the budget to do this properly. We also had to rely on PR to generate some free live TV coverage and make the whole campaign harder working.

All our executions focus on a key moment of truth – when a fisherman finds himself in the water – and are pretty self-explanatory, but our radio is worthy of special mention because it commanded 69% of the budget.

It was designed to deliver a more personal message into the homes of fishermen and their families with activity focused around weather breaks and sea area forecasts to optimise reach and limit wastage. This was supplemented by local coastal stations in areas such as Donegal, Galway and Kerry.


Figure 2. Media Schedule

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We made a point of topping the radio ad break with a 15-second reminder of our 40-second launch ad, then tailing it with a new execution whose eerie silence spoke to the reality that without a PFD you don’t live to tell the tale like David did.

Mindshare struggled to find a sufficient number of outdoor sites in coastal communities so they upweighted radio and press where necessary. On our creative recommendation, BIM approved bespoke large scale semi-permanent outdoor sites on their ice plants in 7 key fishing ports around Ireland to act as a trigger / reminder at fishermen’s points of departure.

We would obviously have liked to have backlit these pierside billboards given the time of year and time of day fishermen set out to sea, but time and resources didn’t allow on this occasion.

[i] According to a HSA report entitled “Managing Health and Safety in Fishing”, an analysis of 24 Irish fatal fishing incidents, which occurred over an 11-year period and resulted in 42 fishermen losing their lives, showed that the main cause of the incidents was the vessel sinking. It reveals that in many cases these fishermen were wearing no form of PFD, which made their recovery from the water slow and difficult. It concludes that in a quarter of the cases, no bodies were ever recovered. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that in the 53 fatality cases recorded over the last 10 years, only 25% or 1 in 4 bodies were recovered.

[ii] The three creative routes we put into qualitative research were:

a) “It’s not just your life jacket” – inspired by the concern that fishermen displayed for keeping others safe at sea. If they won’t wear PFDs for themselves, maybe they would wear them for family and friends.

This was deemed to be an important emotional trigger but there was a danger of over-emoting by focusing exclusively on family members.

b) “Look smart” – inspired by the fact that fishermen do everything they can to stay safe on the boat – including abiding by questionable superstition – but not the one thing that keeps them safe in the water, i.e. their PFD.

The dark humour deployed here really resonated but it was a bridge too far to suggest that fishermen actually rejected the importance of PFDs and younger fishermen felt it undermined the seriousness of their profession.


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c) “Live to tell the tale” – inspired by the fact that dead men don’t tell tales and fishermen are full of stories of near misses on the boat. A PFD is the one thing that helps them live to tell the tale if they ever end up in the water.

This route was felt to be the most credible and compelling overall.

[iii] A note on use of languageWhilst we recognise that many fishermen are now in possession of the new compact PFD and that strictly speaking, life jackets are different, we have chosen to use them interchangeably in our creative executions. We generally refer to PFDs whenever we’re talking up their specific benefits, but when we’re alluding to them in layman’s terms, we talk about life jackets. It sounds more colloquial and less forced.


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Commercial Objective

There has been a 23.5% increase in the number of fishermen who enrolled for Enhanced Safety Training places in late January/February 2016 versus the same period in 2015, so we bypassed our target of 15%.

Marketing and Advertising Objectives

Almost 8 in 10 fishermen recalled our advertising campaign. Radio was spontaneously recalled by 44% of our target (compared to a norm of 17% for a utility provider promoting a safety message in this medium[i]). Recall rose to 71% when the radio ad was played.

93% of fishermen thought our radio ad had a very strong or compelling message. “Always wear a PFD” was the clear message take-out by 77%, followed by 21% for whom it was about “PFDs offering the best chance of survival”.

The desired impact on behavioural attitude was achieved and is covered off in the relevant section.

Proving the advertising effect In an ideal world, we would have asked BIM to commission a pre advertising tracking study to establish some campaign specific attitudinal benchmarks, but BIM’s research budget had already been allocated by the time we were appointed to their business.

In a situation like this, we would normally have put a few questions into an Omnibus or online survey at our own expense but because fishermen are such a niche audience, they can’t be reached in the numbers required by either method.

RESULTS

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Our only option was to add campaign specific statements into the post tracking questionnaire and hope that the scores would be higher for those exposed to the advertising compared to those who weren’t.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that we would be victims of our own success. 77% of fishermen were exposed to our campaign, which meant that there was no statistically significant difference on the majority of variables, because the sample size for those who weren’t exposed to it was too small.

Our one saving grace is that BIM don’t have the kind of budget to be involved in any other activities that could have conceivably impacted on our results.

There were no other water safety campaigns running before, during or after our advertising campaign that could have generated a heightened safety mindset amongst our fishermen.[ii]

There was no major tragedy at sea during this time either, which could have generated more media coverage, made our campaign more newsworthy or made our fishermen more safety conscious in its immediate aftermath.

There was no seasonality working in our favour either. January is statistically the most dangerous month of the year for fishermen, so could that explain away any improvements on our May figures?

According to BIM’s head of safety training, if anything, the reverse is true. The run up to May is traditionally the time when most safety training takes place. It’s the official start of the lobster fishing season (the main activity of smaller fishermen) and a time when most fishermen have therefore just completed any repair or upgrade work on their vessels.

Taking all this into account, May is arguably a time when sea safety is more top of mind for our fishermen than January, even though the month of January has a greater likelihood of bad weather and fatalities.

RESULTS

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We can therefore assume that all of the changes measured in the post tracking are due to the pure advertising effect of our campaign.

Calculating Payback

BIM spent a total of €159,535 (ex VAT) on this campaign – €79,653 on media, €36,987 on production, €18,740 on research, €16,350 on fees and €7,805 on PR.

€126,077 of free publicity generated

According to a media evaluation report carried out by Newsaccess between 1st December 2015 and 8th March 2016, our campaign generated €71,632 worth of free broadcast coverage and €54,445 worth of free press coverage – that’s a total of €126,077 worth of free PR.

According to BIM, an average of 5 fishermen die at sea every year and the WHO puts the value of a European statistical life at €2.487m.

With more fishermen signing up to safety training, more availing of subsidised new PFDs and more claiming to actually wear them, BIM has increased their chances of survival if they end up in the water.

If even one fisherman this year survives on account of wearing his PFD, our campaign will have paid for itself almost 13 times over.

In the worst case scenario it will have significantly increased his family’s chances of retrieving his body. No-one can possibly put a value on that.

RESULTS

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If a fisherman wearing their PLB enabled PFD goes overboard, they can be rescued on average within 40 minutes by helicopter. Without one, rescue missions can last for days while putting the lives of volunteers at risk, all at considerable cost to the state.

In 2015, €90.4m was spent on the protection of marine environment, safety of transport and maritime emergency services[iii].

If we assume that emergency services account for a third of this spend i.e. €30m, and factor in that fishing vessels account for 7.4% (or 185 out of a total of 2,500) of all emergencies recorded by the Irish Coast Guard, we can estimate that last year, fishing vessel emergencies cost the state around €2.4m.[iv]

That’s €555 per fisherman in Ireland – 14 times the cost of our entire campaign at €39 per fisherman.

1,198 fishermen completed this training in 2015, an average of 200 every two months. So the value of the 23.5% increase in uptake of training attributed to our campaign already equates to 46 more fishermen saving €175 each on the cost of a PLB enabled PFD in the first two months of this year versus last - an incremental saving of €8,050 which, if sustained, will equate to €48,300 by the end of 2016.

Even if we only take the value of free media coverage and the incremental savings already secured, the BIM Safety at Sea campaign has already more than paid for itself.

[i] B&A provided this norm to us based on similar research they conducted for a large utility client with a much higher media spend.

[ii] The only water related campaign that ran in 2015 was by the RNLI. Given that it was about boat stability and took place a full calendar year before ours, we can discount any helpful competitive activity that might have been misattributed to the efforts of BIM.

[iii] Source: Department of Public Expenditure and Reform

[iv] There was no estimate available for the average cost of a sea rescue in Ireland, but the US Coast Guard have calculated the average cost of their sea rescue to be $16,342 or €14,355. When you multiply this by the 185 fishing vessel incidents recorded by the Irish Coast Guard last year, the total cost is €2.65m, so our estimate of €2.4m is probably modest enough.

RESULTS

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The proportion of fishermen claiming to wear the latest PFDs has increased from 74% in May 2015 to 80% in February 2016, whilst the use of traditional PFDs has halved from 20% to 10% over the same time period.

Of those exposed to the advertising, 6 in 10 fishermen say they always wear their PFD when they go to sea now [i].

In three important incidences, the fishermen exposed to our advertising were significantly more likely to totally agree with the following statements than those who weren’t;

“It would be irresponsible of me to go to sea without a PFD” “I wouldn’t tolerate anyone not wearing a PFD on my boat” “Wearing a PFD is my best chance of living to tell the tale”

Our advertising has improved the extent of PFD wearing in more areas of the boat - “not worn in other safe zones” is down from 32% in May 2015 to 26% in February 2016.

It has expanded the use of PFDs even in fair weather conditions – “weather dependent wearing” is down from 24% in May 2015 to 18% in February 2016, and 59% now disagree that “I only wear a PFD when the weather is bad”.

Advertising has reduced perceptions of PFDs as “cumbtersome” from 33% in May 2015 to 21% in February 2016, and 57% now disagree that “no matter what I’m told, PFDs are too cumbersome to wear”. The perception of PFDs being of “poor design” has also more than halved, down from 20% in May 2015 to 9% in February 2016.

The PFDs haven’t physically changed pre and post the advertising. It’s the exact same product that’s being viewed differently. Now that their life saving capacity is more fully appreciated, they come in for less rational criticism and are being used more widely than before.

IMPACT ON BEHAVIOURAL ACTIVITY AND PAYBACK

Figure 3. Actions most impacted by our advertising

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The campaign has exceeded all our expectations of making fishermen more positive about the benefits of wearing their PFDs, with the majority totally agreeing or disagreeing with everything we wanted them to, as the chart below clearly demonstrates. (Figure 4)

What excited us most was that 97% of fishermen exposed to our advertising said that it led them to at least one positive form of action, with each fisherman mentioning an average of almost five positive actions each. Signing up to safety training was reassuringly top of their to-do list. (Figure 5)

Our advertising idea was always intended to provide a stage for a public (and at times, very poignant) exchange of survivor tales, and to persuade several well-known survivors to lend their support to the campaign launch, both of which it did.

What we didn’t expect was the extent to which other, unknown survivors have since come forward with their stories[ii] or the level of engagement on social media which our campaign generated. According to Max Media, #LiveToTell increased fans on Twitter by 5%, fans on Facebook by 4.5% and fans on LinkedIn by 7.8%.

Our campaign results have also provided BIM with the ammunition it needs to pursue the recommendations we made at the outset, namely to:

conduct regular observational studies on PFD wearing to measure changes in actual behaviour. lobby for regular and visible enforcement of mandatory PFD wearing to maximise the impact of all future advertising[iii].

Taken together, these campaign outcomes will undoubtedly raise the perceived professionalism and therefore stature of the fishing industry in Ireland, thereby contributing to meeting its Food Wise 2025 objectives.


Figure 4. Wearing PFD lifejackets is acknowledged to be crucially important

Figure 5. Standout actions

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[i] There was a technical error in the phrasing of one of the key questions in the original B&A benchmarking study which was designed to determine the frequency with which fishermen claim to wear their PFDs.

Instead of asking fishermen, “Do you wear your PFD – all of the time, most of the time, some of the time or none of the time”, the question was phrased as:

“When you are fishing, do you wear a personal flotation device that is correctly fastened – i.e. all straps are fastened – all of the time, most of the time etc.?”

We believe that instead of answering a question about the frequency with which fishermen wore their PFD, they ended up answering a question about the frequency with which they wore their PFD with all the straps correctly fastened.

This discrepancy might never have come to light at all but for the fact that we found ourselves scrutinising the original questionnaire to explain a conundrum the post tracking results presented us with.

Whilst we weren’t expecting a large increase in claimed behaviour change on the back of one small scale campaign (at least compared to most public safety campaigns), it didn’t make sense why this was the only measure that hadn’t improved when every other important measure had.

When you think about it, an advertising campaign about the life-saving benefits of PFDs that makes no mention of the importance of correctly fastening straps is hardly going to increased the proportion of fishermen tying all of their PFD straps more of the time.

In fact, we knew from our own research that many fishermen leave the crotch strap loosely tied or untied to facilitate going to the toilet. Whilst this is not ideal, it certainly doesn’t render the PFD’s life-saving properties redundant.

So whilst we can show a definite increase in claimed wearing of new PFDs, ambiguity remains around the interpretation and therefore results of the claimed frequency of PFD wearing reported in both the pre and post quant research.

[ii] One had been so traumatised by his experience that he hadn’t even told his own family, but our campaign convinced him to share his experience as a cautionary tale to others.

[iii] There is no single authority currently charged with this responsibility. The MSO have this remit but only in a recreational capacity. BIM is committed to doing whatever it takes, however long it takes to ensure a single body is legally charged with policing the wearing of PFDs.

Once this is in place, we would recommend that this agency front-loads its communications efforts/resources into the first 6 months because, as with the decision to wear seatbelts or safety helmets, once PFDs are worn regularly, fishermen will feel vulnerable going to sea without them.

We would also encourage BIM to come out with their own campaign about this new enforcement of PFD wearing, rather than relying on some official press release from an authority fishermen don’t rate or trust. Otherwise the move could be seen as a money-making exercise at their expense.


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If ever there was a reminder of the importance of ethnographic observation, of going beyond the obvious to really get under the skin of a sub culture that most outsiders struggle to understand or even access, this campaign is it.

If we had taken our quantitative research results at face value…

…our creative would have sought to address rational barriers around discomfort, instead of the true, deep-seated, psychological barrier associated with a macho but surprisingly safety conscious culture.

…we would have been promoting an official, easy-to-opt-out-of definition of safety, rather than one based on a genuine understanding of the dangers fishermen face and the pro-active measures they take to stay safe at sea.

If we hadn’t undertaken ethnographic research, we wouldn’t have unearthed fishermen’s deepest fear - of being lost at sea forever. Nor would we have known how to overcome their “superiority bias”.

By crediting them with being the safety experts up to the point where they end up in the water, when only a PFD can reunite them dead or alive with their loved ones, fishermen were willing to take our safety message take on board in theory as well as in practice.

NEW LEARNINGS

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What we set out to achieve in one short campaign was highly ambitious - to persuade an audience who know the dangers of the sea better than anyone else, but who still believe that their superior seamanship will save them from ever needing to use a PFD - to think again and start taking the necessary steps to change the habit of a lifetime.

We unearthed a fundamental truth: PFDs cannot avert disaster if disaster is ending up in the sea.

By recognising this and positioning PFDs as the only thing that can save them once in the water, fishermen were willing to reappraise their usefulness.

By reframing the role of PFDs from “life savers” to their “best chance of being reunited with their loved ones, dead or alive”, we tapped into fishermen’s worst fear – of their body being lost at sea – causing them to change their attitudes towards wearing PFDs and sign up for more safety training.

SUMMARY

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DDFH&B

MEDIA GALLERY

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