Intact Insurance has launched a social media video series built around a handcrafted, 1:12 scale miniature house subjected to five extreme weather perils: wildfire, flooding, hail, wind and snow.
The campaign, part of Intact's "Keep it Intact" prevention program launched in 2025, pairs each disaster scene with practical prevention tips homeowners can act on immediately. Every effect, from hail and burn marks to flood damage, was built and shot practically by miniature artist Spencer Barclay and his team, a frequent contributor to Toronto's Little Canada attraction, with no AI used in production.
"For many homeowners, the risks of extreme weather can feel abstract," said Mel Wright, Intact Insurance's VP of communications and head of its prevention program. "The miniatures campaign is designed to change that. It's a serious message delivered in a scroll-stopping way."
The production, developed over 12 months with agency VMG Cinematic, involved building interchangeable house panels for each disaster scenario and six separate versions of a basement set to capture different stages of flood damage.
Intact's release cited IBC's own figure that severe weather caused more than $2.4 billion in insured damage in 2025, the tenth costliest year on record.
What the campaign's footnote doesn't include is the trend line behind that single-year figure, which makes the number considerably more significant than it looks in isolation.
IBC has said Canada's annual insured losses from catastrophic weather nearly tripled between the 2006-2015 decade ($14 billion total, inflation-adjusted) and 2016-2025 ($37 billion total), while average claims volume nearly doubled over the same period.
Placed against that backdrop, 2025's $2.4 billion, driven by a March ice storm, spring wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, a Calgary hailstorm and prairie storms in August, was actually a comparatively quiet year following 2024's record $9.4 billion. The five perils dramatized in Intact's miniature series map directly onto the actual events driving these figures year after year, which is a more substantive connection than a marketing campaign typically bothers to get right.
This campaign sits alongside more operational prevention work Intact has been building since 2024. It includes a partnership with Wildfire Defense Systems that automatically deploys trained crews to defend eligible BC and Alberta homes when a wildfire comes within five kilometres, and an ongoing partnership between the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation and the University of Waterloo focused on community-level wildfire resilience.
Viewed alongside that infrastructure, the miniature video series reads less like an isolated creative stunt and more like the public-facing layer of a prevention strategy Intact has been building for a couple of years, though it's worth noting the campaign itself doesn't mention or link to those other programs, so viewers encountering it in isolation wouldn't necessarily know they exist.
Campaigns like this are ultimately a proxy for something more concrete -- whether a carrier's prevention messaging translates into real mitigation-linked product features, and whether the tips presented in a 60-second social video align with what actually qualifies a client for a discount or a service like automatic wildfire defense.
Intact's prevention tips are consistent with standard guidance already covered elsewhere in this year's wildfire and hail coverage, defensible space, fire-resistant materials, gutter maintenance, and the campaign's real value for brokers may be less about the miniatures themselves and more as a conversation starter with clients who've seen the videos and are now asking what these tips actually mean for their own coverage and eligibility for programs like Intact's wildfire defense service.
