Brita are renowned for their household water filters. It’s no surprise that an estimated 20 billion litres of water flow through their products annually. Despite this, awareness of their Fill&Go bottles – which use a filtration disc to provide clean water anywhere – had been low before our campaign (June 2019).

To combat this, Brita wanted to launch an impactful social purpose campaign to fall in line with their drive for ‘great tasting water without the waste’. Our main objective was to raise awareness with a campaign that would rally wellness communities across various demographics on Instagram into action.

For Brita, the overarching plan was to also play a bigger role in conversations surrounding climate change and, in particular, plastic ocean waste. Lastly, our campaign needed to be social-first and cut through saturated Instagram feeds.

Instagram is commonly associated with pictures of paradise, from pristine beaches to turquoise oceans. But these photographs and the accounts that share them rarely tell the full story. We know that plastic pollution is a massive threat to natural beauty spots like the Great Barrier Reef and yet you would never guess looking at Instagram.

We sought to change this and shock Instagram into action by reimagining wanderlust as a wasteland. Taking inspiration from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s shocking prediction that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050, we created #NoFilterNoFuture.

We took real holiday photos from 20 travel influencers and lifestyle bloggers – with their permission – and digitally manipulated them using Photoshop to show how our beaches could look if the rate of plastic waste continues. We seeded the photos across Instagram alongside the hashtag to raise awareness of the issue at hand.

The most important aspect of our strategy was to find people that are actually influential. We’re lucky to have a tool – designed and built in-house – that uses AI and various algorithms to scan influencers’ followings for data on fake Instagram likes, clicks, followers and engagement anomalies. We used this data to choose talent to front the campaign.

Once we found 20 relevant influencers with affinities to travel and wellness, we shared Brita’s initiative and convinced each to let us digitally Photoshop their personal travel photos in-house. With a low budget and a mainly organic campaign, a key move was to post 20 in-feed photos simultaneously using #NoFilterNoFuture to gamify Instagram’s algorithm and generate as much reach as possible. We call this method thunder-clapping.

Overall, our strategy was simply to raise awareness and deliver these home truths across all demographics on an all too often self-obsessed platform. It worked.

On June 28, after endless hours spent editing travel photographs with plastic litter for optimum realism, we went live with #NoFilterNoFuture. Across Instagram, all 20 influencers posted a photo and the hashtag, along with a caption written in their TOV that urged people to wake up to the damage of single-use plastic bottle waste.

We watched likes, comments and reactions quickly to the campaign quickly pour in, as the effect of our ‘thunderclap’ caused Instagram’s algorithms to push our content to more people through the feed and Explore tab. How do we know this was the case? Because a mere few days later, the response went phenomenal.

Following our initial push, Instagram users who hadn’t even been part of the launch begin to copy the campaign and edit and post their travel photos themselves. Our influencers also followed up with in-feed product posts, pledging to use Brita's Fill&Go bottles.

We’ve mentioned how many Instagram users organically recreated #NoFilterNoFuture, leading to spikes in UGC. But it was the international press that sent the campaign stratospheric.

The MailOnline, LadBible and MSN were just three major publishers to cover #NoFilterNoFuture. On July 03, LadBible wrote: “Social media [is] awash with responses from people who have been inspired to make changes with many calling on governments around the world to take notice.” The response was phenomenal, with one user commenting: “This is so beautifully done and your pint comes across loud and clear ????”

Overall, the campaign led to 2,398,866 impressions across the Instagram feed, with 2,000,000 views on Stories. Engagements reached 284,500 (2.82% engagement rate). Taking press circulation into account, this was boosted by a potential 62,183,047 impressions across online news. Brita also reported an uplift in product traffic on Amazon, thanks to #NoFilterNoFuture.