Winning 3 Cannes Lions by Saving Wildlife: Inside the FIRECATCHERS Campaign

At inStreamly, we believe in the power of the gaming community to drive real-world change. The FIRECATCHERS campaign is the ultimate testament to this. In partnership with Havas Play France and the French Fire and Rescue Services (Fédération nationale des sapeurs-pompiers de France), we helped turn Twitch viewers into a life-saving, real-time wildfire early-warning system.

The global advertising industry recognized this unprecedented blend of media innovation and social impact. The campaign dominated the 2026 award season, securing major global hardware:

• Cannes Lions 2026:
  • 🥈 Silver Lion: Media
  • 🥉 Bronze Lion: Media
  • 🥉 Bronze Lion: Brand Experience & Activation
  • 5 additional shortlists
• The One Show 2026:
  • 🥇 Gold Pencil (1x)
  • 🥉 Bronze Pencils (3x) (Including Creator Content / Community Activation & Social Media / Livestream)
• Internationalist Awards 2026:
  • 🏆 Grand Prix: 18th Annual Internationalist Awards for Innovation in Media

A nation under threat

To understand the necessity of this campaign, one must look at the escalating environmental crisis preceding it. Driven by anthropogenic climate change and extreme fire weather conditions, southwestern France experienced an exceptional wildfire season in 2022, recording a burned area 14 times higher than the 2006–2023 average. During that devastating year, wildfires across France destroyed over 66,337 hectares of land. The destruction only continued in subsequent years; in 2025 alone, France lost 35,000 hectares of natural forest, equivalent to 17 megatonnes of CO₂ emissions.

While authorities had installed surveillance cameras across high-risk forest zones to combat this, early detection remained a massive logistical challenge. The camera infrastructure was in place, but there simply weren’t enough human eyes to monitor these feeds 24/7.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

Gamers are the ultimate watchers

Every Twitch broadcast begins with a 5-to-10-minute “Starting Soon” screen. Thousands of dedicated viewers sit through this idle period, simply waiting. Furthermore, gamers are uniquely trained to spot micro-details, scan vast digital landscapes, and maintain focus for hours. We realized we could channel this massive, untapped attention span toward a critical cause.

Turning Twitch into a wildfire detection network

Instead of displaying generic animated graphics, the FIRECATCHERS campaign replaced the “Starting Soon” screens of French Twitch streamers with live, real-time surveillance footage from high-risk forest zones.

The mechanics were simple but highly effective:

• Viewers watched the live feed during the pre-stream waiting period.
• If anyone spotted suspicious smoke, they immediately reported it in the streamer’s chat.
• Once multiple reports converged, an alert was routed directly to the CODIS (Departmental Operational Fire and Rescue Center).
• Human moderation and 24/7 monitoring were ensured collaboratively by Twitch teams and on-the-ground firefighters.

“Firecatchers was built like a game, not a campaign. A real time, always on MMO style experience where thousands of players shared one mission: spot the first spark before it became a wildfire. The mechanics felt instantly familiar to gamers: scan the environment, detect anomalies, react fast. The “game world” was the real forests of southern France, streamed live. The HUD was the waiting screen of their favourite streamers. The quests were weak signal detections. And the co op mode came from Instreamly and their 604 streamers mobilising their communities. Firecatchers turned waiting into gameplay creating a new genre of socially useful play.”
Pierre Acuña, Head of Gaming and Esports @ Havas Play France

Our role: scaling the network

A crowdsourced surveillance network only works at a massive scale. That’s where we stepped in, providing the vital tech infrastructure and creator recruitment needed to mobilize this digital force.

• 600+ Streamers Activated: We seamlessly onboarded a massive roster of French creators via our platform.
• Massive Reach: The initial wave of streamers collectively commanded an audience of nearly 600,000 participating followers.
• Seamless Distribution: We distributed the live surveillance feeds and campaign assets (produced by Havas Play) directly into the broadcasts, promoting the Firefighters’ official Twitch channel and inviting viewers to become active watchers.

Protecting the real world while waiting for the virtual to load

Running throughout the summer of 2025, FIRECATCHERS successfully transformed idle waiting time into active civic participation.

• Created a crowdsourced fire detection network that actively covered high-risk forest areas across France.
• Reached the unreachable by engaging gaming audiences and heavy ad-block users who are notoriously difficult to reach through traditional public safety PSAs.
• Generated massive global earned media, proving the positive, real-world utility of livestreaming communities.

FIRECATCHERS is a win for the entire streaming ecosystem, proving that together, gamers can protect the real world while waiting for their virtual ones to load.