Sapeurs-Pompiers de France — FireCatchers (France)
GRAND PRIX — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
FireCatchers transformed the minutes Twitch audiences normally spend waiting for a stream to begin into a collective early-warning system for wildfires.
Submitted by Havas Play France
Winner’s Citation
For recognizing the untapped value of human attention—and transforming an ordinary Twitch ritual into a participatory public-safety network that helped detect wildfires before they could spread.
How It Makes a World of Difference
Wildfires rarely begin dramatically.
They begin with something small: a wisp of smoke, a subtle change in a landscape, a moment that someone needs to notice before a small fire becomes something much more dangerous.
For France’s Sapeurs-Pompiers, early detection is critical. Firefighters already spend countless hours monitoring surveillance cameras across the country’s forests. But there simply aren’t enough eyes to watch everything, all the time.
FireCatchers found more eyes in an unexpected place.
Every day on Twitch, thousands of viewers arrive before their favorite streamers begin broadcasting. For five or ten minutes, they watch the familiar “Starting Soon” screen.
And gamers are unusually accustomed to doing something useful in those minutes: watching carefully, noticing movement and spotting small changes in visual patterns.
FireCatchers replaced the usual waiting screen with live surveillance feeds from high-risk forest areas.
The initiative began with four major French streamers. Viewers joining their streams saw a live forest rather than a looping graphic and received a simple instruction: if you see suspicious smoke, report it in the chat. When multiple matching alerts appeared, the signal was escalated to the local emergency operations center for verification.
The brilliance of the idea was also its simplicity.
Streamers didn’t have to alter their programming or schedules. Viewers didn’t have to download something new or learn an unfamiliar behavior.
FireCatchers simply made the attention already there useful.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing didn’t ask people to pay attention to wildfire prevention. It gave their attention a job to do.
That’s an important distinction.
Twitch wasn’t simply a channel carrying a public-service message. Its audience became part of the mechanism.
A piece of media real estate normally devoted to waiting became a watchtower. Chat became a reporting tool. Streamers became gateways to a distributed community of volunteers. And viewers moved from audience to participants in public safety.
After the initial launch, 646 additional streamers joined the initiative, dramatically expanding the network without requiring the campaign to manufacture a new audience or invent an entirely new technology.
Something meaningful happened because marketing got involved:
Attention became participation. And participation became vigilance.
Results That Make a Difference
In its first activation phase, FireCatchers mobilized streamer communities representing nearly 600,000 followers and generated 2,190 hours of forest surveillance—all during moments that previously served little purpose beyond waiting.
Most importantly, according to the submission, the initiative contributed to the detection of five fires and helped protect 1,700 more hectares of forest compared with 2024.
The model is also expanding: Spain and Italy are expected to adopt the approach in 2026.
Those results make the larger lesson unusually clear.
FireCatchers didn’t create more media.
It discovered more value in attention that already existed.
And in doing so, marketing helped turn an everyday digital ritual into something capable of making a difference in the physical world.
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