Water Safety Ireland
Creative Producer and Art Director
Three briefs, one client, and three completely different reasons people needed to hear from Water Safety Ireland this year.
Recruitment
First was recruitment. The insight there was blunt: 18 to 25 year olds saw lifeguarding as a summer job, not a qualification worth having. So the work stopped selling the whistle and the tan and started selling the actual argument, comparing lifeguard training hours to how much time that age group already spends on entertainment without thinking twice. Two weeks of activity, 403 registrations and 338,000 people reached later, it did its job before the season even started.
National Water Safety Awareness Week
Then came National Water Safety Awareness Week, built around a much bigger insight: almost nobody who drowns expects to be in the water. It happens on dog walks, on piers, walking home. So instead of warning swimmers, we made four short films rooted in exactly those ordinary moments, each one withholding the safety message until the very end, because nobody stops scrolling for a warning, but they'll stop for a story that feels like it's about them. It ran across social, search, display, radio and podcasts. All in, it reached 9.5 million impressions and 1.7 million people nationally. Best part was who actually watched: engagement rose with age, and the 65+ audience delivered the campaign's strongest click-through rate (an insight-led target based on the age of drownings in Ireland), proof the storytelling worked well outside the usual scroll-and-skip crowd.
World Drowning Prevention Day
The last one needed the opposite register entirely. "Empty Spaces" doesn't show water, or an accident, or anyone in danger. Just a chair, a pair of boots by the door, an unused fishing rod. The whole idea is that a drowning doesn't just take a life, it leaves a space nobody else can fill, and you don't need to see the tragedy to feel that. 3.1 million impressions, 1.27 million people reached, 1.44 million video views, all for a film with no danger, no drama and nobody in the water at all.
Same client, same underlying mission, three completely different jobs, which is usually the real test of whether you understand a brand: can you speak for it in a register built for urgency, one built for reach, and one built for grief, without any of them sounding like they came from somewhere else.
