NRMA Insurance’s ‘First Saturday’ ad pulled for distressingly realistic scenes of bushfires and volunteer firefighters

NRMA Insurance’s ‘First Saturday’ campaign film has been discontinued after the advertising self-regulator, Ad Standards, received complaints from viewers that the footage of firefighters heading into a bushfire was distressing.

The campaign, from CHE Proximity, uses re-enacted footage of a real RFS volunteer firefighters inside the firetruck, in an effort to remind Australians of the national tension and devastation of created by bushfire crises throughout recent history. More broadly the campaign gives Australians a task to perform on the first Saturday of every month in order to make their homes more bushfire-ready.

However, the scenes inside the truck were the target of the complaints. One came from a RFS volunteer who wrote that they volunteered during last summer’s bushfire crisis and lost their home. The complainant wrote that the campaign was “very disturbing and in poor taste”. Another complainant, a parent of an RFS volunteer, labelled the ad “extremely disturbing and upsetting”.