Brita Canada believes that access to good clean water is a fundamental human right. With that in mind, the company began a partnership with ME To WE as a way to make that belief a reality. So far, the program has provided over 55,400 people in Kenya with clean water.

It's an amazing partnership, but we wanted a way to further amplify and gain attention for this initiative. To do that we needed to contextualize the problem and offer an easy solution for consumers to act on.

These days, we’re able to skip things we don’t want to see. Like pre-roll ads. Just click a button and it goes away. But not everyone is that lucky.

Millions of women in Africa walk hours a day for clean water. They can’t just “skip it.” To help Brita + Me To We’s campaign for change we filmed a real woman’s daily walk for water, creating a 4 hour 17 minute YouTube pre-roll ad.

We followed a real woman in real time and documented her daily trek to a local watering hole. A button embedded in the video prompted viewers to “end her walk” which linked to Walmart.ca where viewers could purchase a specially marked Brita bottle – bringing clean water to a person in Africa for one year.

We played on society’s impatience and offered a way to help that was as simple as skipping an ad.

The YouTube platform and the familiar ‘skip ad’ button was at the core of our idea. Users expect short pre-roll ads on YouTube videos, which is why the platform was selected. Seeing a 4+ hour pre-roll ad stood out and grabbed users’ attention and prompted high engagement.

A target audience was built using YouTube’s first party data (educated women 35-45), leveraging interests such as nutrition, social responsibility, travel, home appliances and more. These interests aligned well with Brita’s product offering, as well as the theme of the campaign. The data used to build these interest audiences was collected by Google and includes YouTube behaviour data (what users have searched and watched) as well as Google’s behaviour data collected outside of YouTube (past Google search history and websites visited).

The campaign launched on March 21, 2019, the day before World Water Day. “Water for all” awareness was very high at the end of March with searches spiking for these types of search terms on March 22 (World Water Day). This was the perfect time to launch as users were already primed with water shortage awareness messages from several media outlets and were much more likely to take action at this time. Much of the campaign’s budget was spent on March 22 (World Water Day) to fully exploit the power of this event. The campaign timeline coincided with heavy media attention and scrutiny for brand safety concerns on YouTube. As such, extreme caution was used serving this campaign by leveraging additional brand safety measures to ensure the ad was delivered to the right audience against brand-safe content.

Brita Canada believes access to clean water is a fundamental human right, so they partnered with ME to WE to make that belief a reality. So far, the program has provided over 55,400 Kenyans with clean water. Purchases of specially marked products provide the funds to drill a borehole that taps into a natural aquifer and provides water for an entire village in Kenya for at least 70 years.

Furthermore, each bottle was affixed with a code that consumers used to track their impact on a website, featuring stats and stories of the impacted of the program. At the time of submission, results are limited as this campaign only just launched. Initial results are impressive: Click through rate 12% higher than industry norms, 46% View Rate was 44% higher than benchmarks.