The social and economic cost of injury to New Zealand is great. In a country with a population of just 5 million, around 2 million New Zealanders are getting injured every year. As part of an injury prevention programme, ACC (New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Corporation) needed to increase personal relevance and key message outtake of pausing and thinking before taking a risk, within a typically hard to reach and influence audience - people who love to take risks.

When thrill-seeking sports lovers aren’t out there doing high-adrenaline, high-risk sports, they’re watching it. So when ACC needed to reach this audience with an injury prevention message, we hijacked high-action snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking and surfing videos, with content that was the painful opposite…the extreme no-action aftermath of injury. Using AI technology to contextually target on YouTube, we served up very, very long pre-rolls - an entire 60 minutes of no-action content showing friends staying home to keep an injured mate company while they tackled jigsaw puzzles, cards and chess instead of the mountains, surf and bike tracks. Our 60-minute content was fully skippable after 6 seconds, so we made sure our message “if you get hurt, who gets harmed? Have a hmmm” was seen no matter how long people watched for.

We know when this audience isn’t out doing high-risk adventure sports, they’re watching videos of other people doing it on YouTube. They’re always looking for ways to improve themselves and see risk as an opportunity to gain and live life. Although this audience isn’t concerned about the impact of a potential injury to themselves, research showed they are concerned about the potential impact on others. By focusing on the potential negative social consequences and showing the very boring reality of the aftermath of injury, we could resonate with this audience and influence a behaviour change, without telling them to not do the thing they love.

We know when this audience isn’t out doing high-action, risky adventure sports, they’re watching it. We created three activity-specific 60-minute pre-rolls and placed these videos on Youtube with a context detection platform that uses AI technology. This allowed us to contextually target our audience before they watched high-action activity (skiing, snowboarding, surfing and mountain biking) videos.

Rolling out across a key sports participation period, our content hijacked videos from August to September 2022, being seen 7.5 million times.

Our thrill-seeking sports lovers didn’t hit skip after six seconds of watching our pre-rolls, instead an astonishing 74% tortured themselves and watched up to 14 minutes of our no-action content. With 10% watching the entire painful 60 minutes.

The most important outcome was that our safety message stuck with this hard to influence audience and has resulted in 74% saying they have since taken an action to prevent injury.