We set out to create the world’s first anti-influencer. We knew young guys wouldn’t listen to advice on being safe, so we invented someone who would give such atrocious advice, no one would ever follow it. We created the Swim Reaper – a sociopathic Instagrammer who, instead of dispensing safety advice, would dispense drowning advice.

His jarringly offensive and incredibly dark sense of humour would shock, entertain and engage our audience, while ironically pointing out just how dumb their dangerous behaviour is. In other words, our aim was to save lives by encouraging deaths.

For this to work, he needed to behave as a real member of the social media “inner circle”:

- Be discovered: Have natural social capital and not seem like an ad.

- Participate: Be active in mateship conversations.

- Be salient in the moment: Relevant to every potentially fatal opportunity across NZ’s most dangerous spots.

As summer started, we orchestrated a discovery phase, ensuring the Swim Reaper started infiltrating our audience’s newfeeds organically. Firstly, by convincing Water Safety to launch without branding, negating “ad avoidance”.

Then, we rolled out over 100 pieces of content from the Swim Reaper over the 2017/18 summer, encouraging all the bad behaviours that lead to fatalities.

As engagement and followers snowballed, he started participating – using hashtags to find guys posting dumb swimming behaviour and leaving encouraging comments. He was omnipresent – at every beach, river and lake, encouraging every bad behaviour in the book.

The Swim Reaper achieved cult status, making headlines around the world:

- “This ‘Swim Reaper’ Instagram account is absolute gold.” – BoredPanda

- “A country created a viral vacationing ‘Swim Reaper’ and people love it.” – BuzzFeed

- “NZ’s water safety mascot is going viral for all the right reasons.” – MTV

He amassed over 320,000 Instagram followers, who liked, commented and shared in record numbers – giving him higher engagement than New Zealand’s “real” influencers:

- 353% more engagement than Taika Waititi

- 179% more engagement than the All Blacks

- 70% more engagement than Lorde

But, most importantly, we surpassed Water Safety’s target of halving the number of drownings from the previous year. Over the peak summer period, drownings of young men dropped 81%.*

*Three drownings of males aged 15-24 in New Zealand over the peak summer period of 18 December 2017 – 14 January 2018.

As well as our target group’s propensity for stupid, life-threatening behaviour and their disdain for safety messaging, our challenge was further exacerbated by their media habits. With their smartphone always within reach, they are able to impress their mates through social media like never before. Cliff jumps, wharf bombs, waterfall swan dives – it’s never been easier to become legendary amongst your mates for doing dumb stuff. And being legendary matters: impressing your mates is the underlying motivation behind this bravado.

This revealed our insight – while young men ignore authority, they care deeply about what their inner circle thinks. It would be easy to think these “inner circles” were the problem. But we saw them as a tool. We could create our own inner circle influencer, who could get our audience to reflect on the consequences of their actions and hopefully modify their dumb behaviour around water.

Young men (aged 15-24) make up more than one-third of preventable drownings in New Zealand. Whether it’s a misjudged cliff-jump, a back-flip gone wrong, or swimming after drinking alcohol, young men are far more likely than anyone else to die in the water.

This unfortunate statistic is a product of young Kiwi males thinking they’re invincible, loving the thrill of taking risks and overestimating their ability. It’s a dangerous mix that results in them making bad decisions around water.

Furthermore, this group simply don’t like being told what to do – meaning that water safety advertising telling them to make smarter decisions had struggled to make an impact. In total, 16 young men had lost their lives over the 2016 summer period, and 15 the year before that. The brief was to target this at-risk group in an engaging and compelling way, and halve the number of drownings in 2017/18.