Everybody knows Brita as a brand that allows people to filter out the bad to get to great-tasting, clear water. To show how living a better and healthier life with filtered water goes beyond filling up the glass, Brita took on a more ambitious cause, launching a new effort to filter out negativity.
When launching Brita's new campaign platform – The Filtered Life – we looked at many areas of opportunity to extend the brand's benefit beyond water to show people how to live The Filtered Life. We ultimately landed on the Internet as the place that needed filtering most.
The Internet should be a safe place to be creative, collaborate with others and cheer on our favorites. But unfortunately, we're seeing more and more cases of mean-spirited efforts to hurt other people, with many of these instances involving kids. Through The Filtered Life campaign and Filter Your Feed tool, Brita set out to filter out online haters.
A few key statistics informed our strategic direction:
At the same time we were seeing the quantitative research, media headlines were discussing the growing issue of online hate. A summer on social media had seen attacks on Olympic athletes, Saturday Night Live comedians and more. Time Magazine put Internet trolls on its August 2016 cover and a Wired editorial told the Internet it needed to fix itself.
Armed with these hard-hitting and heart-breaking statistics, we decided to take a stand against the negativity running rampant throughout the Internet. By adopting a platform of filtering out the bad, Brita leaned on its claim to fame – filtering out contaminants – to approach a major issue of this decade: social media hate.
To help draw widespread attention for The Filtered Life, we tapped Brita's existing partner, social media star, new technology entrepreneur and basketball MVP Stephen Curry. He's on the forefront of technology both for engagement with his fans and life beyond basketball. As a person who has experienced online hate, he provided a respected and relatable voice to the campaign.
We launched the campaign in January 2017 with a Filtered Life video series featuring people, including Curry, sharing their unique stories of overcoming negativity, hate and bullying in different ways.
In April, Curry helped us launch a real filter that people could use to eliminate hate in their social channels. The Filter Your Feed tool allowed people to scrub their Twitter history for words deemed negative, and let them delete posts that included negative keywords. The tool also served up fun content to replace the negative, like Curry playing with puppies and enjoying ice cream.
Through media interviews and social posts, Curry invited people to use the tool and make the Internet a happier place. For every scrubbed post or social share with #FilterYourFeed, Brita donated $1 to The Cybersmile Foundation, an international cyberbullying non-profit organization, with the goal of helping to educate and encourage people to eliminate online hate. In working with the non-profit, Brita found a partner that was leading the conversation around this issue and working directly with youth and adults alike to raise awareness and create change.
Media outreach helped drive broad awareness for the campaign, including a segment on CBS' The Late Late Show with James Corden featuring Curry delivering program messaging in an organic and far reaching way. Influencers amplified the program on Twitter, driving their followers to the tool and encouraging them to share our original content and happy posts with their own followers, rallying a positive community.
Through the Filtered Life, we achieved all of our goals and helped shine a spotlight on a truly important, pressing issue – online hate.
•We drove more than 11,000 engagements with the Filter Your Feed tool in less than a month. More than 4,200 unique users authorized the tool to scrub their Twitter feeds and 54,862 negative posts were deleted
•The Filtered Life video series generated more than 24,000 organic views
•We secured 189.6 million earned impressions through outlets like People Magazine, Yahoo! and Mashable, beating our 70 million goal by 170%
•The Late Late Show segment was viewed online more than 7.7 million times
•Social engagement through shares, comments, likes and original posts garnered 61 million online impressions, surpassing the 50 million goal by 22%
- Thanks to #FilterYourFeed hashtag use, Brita donated $81,327 to The Cybersmile Foundation to fund educational programming
