Each year in Australia, some 1000 marine accidents occur involving serious injury or even death on board of boats or ships, costing the nation over $300 million. For a nation of 25m people that’s an incredible financial and emotional burden to bear.

NRMA Insurance, Australia’s leading insurer with a brand purpose of ‘Help’, was determined to come to the rescue. As part of their long-term boating strategy, NRMA Insurance looked at how to minimise potential accidents before and during a trip on Australian waterways.

Interestingly, most boating accidents happen on land, not the sea. Making boat ramps all too often the bane of boat owner’s existence.

Reversing a boat down the ramp is a daunting experience even for the most experienced boat owner.

Thus, in an innovative world-first, NRMA Insurance collaborated with Google Australia to create ‘Ramp Rater’ within Google Street View to rate the difficulty of boat ramps with a simple badge on each ramp embedded directly into the platform. Thereby providing a digital, innovative solution for one of our oldest maritime problems - getting one’s precious boat safely into the water.

The target audience is recreational boat owners in NSW and Queensland. We utilised heat-map data of boat owners to identify coastal ‘hotspots’ across both states to ensure we rated and executed ‘Ramp Rater’ in areas where this demographic frequents - therefore driving the most impact and impressions.

By providing real utility through better understanding boat owners, NRMA Insurance is reaping the rewards via higher quality leads. And that’s smooth sailing for all.

Together with Google we permanently coded and embedded the 'Ramp Rater' into Google's Maps, giving boat owners the confidence required to master the ramp safely.

To create Ramp-Rater, we did not have to create any new digital infrastructure within Google Maps Street View. Instead, we found a solution working within Google guidelines and parameters. A Google Trusted Professional can create and upload a 360 Street View image directly into Google, embedding a circular stamp over the tripod hole in the image.

By enlisting Trusted Professionals under a NRMA Google account, we were able to upload our own branded safety rating in place of the image cap - allowing us to infiltrate the Google Maps world with a branded bespoke safety feature.

This digital solution provided us with the opportunity to leverage an untapped and extremely powerful media channel whilst creating ongoing utility that can be easily and cost-effectively scaled up.

We launched the ‘Ramp Rater’ with a beta test of 44 ramps across two states. Within less than a week of being live, the Google Map integration received up to 20000 views and counting.

These promising results of organic views suggest two things. One. The idea offers real utility to boat owners. Two. The idea tapped into the existing digital behavior of boat owners, which in turn makes this initiative scalable. We are currently in negotiations to roll out the ‘Ramp Rater’ nationally.

As a part of an integrated campaign (including a film, OOH and digital) that provided real utility through better understanding boat owners, NRMA Insurance is reaping the rewards via higher quality leads, including:

Over 1000% increase in visits to the NRMA Insurance product page

Over 1200% increase in website traffic to the NRMA Boat Product landing page

Quotes Started up by 19.5%

Digital Buy Completes up 16.9%