Access to safe water can protect and save lives, just because it's there. Access to safe water has the power to turn time spent into time saved, when it's close and not hours away. Access to safe water can turn problems into potential: unlocking education, economic prosperity, and improved health.

Since 2015, Stella Artois and Water.org have made a partnership to help provide access to safe water for people in the developing world. The global campaigns promoting the partnership usually feature Water.org founder Matt Damon and through the purchase of branded special edition chalices consumers can make a donation to help solve the water crisis.

As an emerging country Argentina has it’s own problems, so it’s hard for consumers to engage with campaigns that provide aid to people in other developing countries. So we created a spin off from the global campaign using local media partners and influencers to achieve stronger results and better engagement. We changed our iconic logo from red to blue in all participating bottles, and communicated it with the #stellabluechallenge a 360 campaign that turned everything blue while raising awareness about water shortage. That was how the Stella Artois bottle with blue label became the campaign hero, made the entire country aware about the world water crisis and made it easier for everyone to help.

Argentineans don’t relate to the water crisis mainly because they are not aware of it. Water shortage is not a problem in Argentina with a vast network of accessible drinking water. So we needed to install the conversation around that matter in the media driving attention to the change of color in our bottle labels. We achieved that by coordinating a national distribution of blue labeled bottles, with the deployment of the influencer campaign and a strong final push on international water day involving media partners, other related brands and even the government. The campaign was targeted to adults in drinking age.

The Blue labeled bottles were distributed all over the country 15 days prior to the first wave of PR deployment raising attention around the product. Then came the influencer campaign triggered by a spin off of the global campaign using Matt Damon, who challenged a local TV host. She challenged other celebrities (models, actors, influencers, NGO founders) and suddenly almost every media outlet was talking about it. Building momentum for 15 days up to international water’s day on March 22nd.

On international Water’s day Clarín (most distributed newspaper in the country) changed it’s iconic red logo to blue, something they haven’t done in their 150 year history. Other famous red brands followed like delivery apps and supermarkets. And even the city of Buenos Aires took the challenge by turning just for that day the most famous water fountains and city monuments blue.

+10% Sales increase Vs previous month (total volume of ltrs sold)

79% positive sentiment

+10M organic impressions

FB impressions 40M

ISTGM impressions 65M

21M dollars donated to the partnership since 2015

1.7 million people helped to access clean water and sanitation (already halfway to our long term commitment of 3.5M).