Challenges:

• Raise awareness about water safety amongst a male audience who are particularly unreceptive to safety messages.

• Engage them with messages about personal risk without making them feel like they were being preached to.

• Convey a tough message despite previous campaigns having erred on the moderate side.

Objective:

• Raise awareness of, and change attitudes to, coastal safety amongst men aged 25-60.

Men are competitive by nature, so we created Man Vs. Water; a 250kg water punch bag. We encouraged thousands of men to take on the opponent that’ll never tire. Unsurprisingly, no one won.

They also love a drink, so we distributed thousands of pint glasses for coastal bars, with stories about local men who drowned after drinking alcohol.

And along the coast, memorial wreaths resembling life rings told stories about local men who died underestimating the water.

This was also supported by other contextual outdoor and radio.

In the campaign locations, data proves that British men’s attitudes to coastal safety changed significantly*. We also saw something else, that its influence spread further afield, catching the imagination of people outside our test area. It was picked up by national news, spread through social channels and even broke past our British coastline to reach 21 million people worldwide.

As a result, this year we’re tripling the locations, and in 2015 we’ll quadruple those again, so we can continue to shift men’s attitudes and get closer to the RNLI’s goal of halving deaths by 2020.