Whereas most people just need to go straight to the nearest sink, today there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who do not have access to clean water.
It is a little known fact that Stella Artois is currently in its 4th year of a partnership with Water.org and co-founder Matt Damon, and that we share a common goal: to help provide access to clean water for 3.5 million people in the developing world by 2020. One of the ways we help fund our efforts is making limited edition Chalices. Each purchase helps provide 5 years of access to clean water for someone in the developing world.
But we know that our efforts are not enough. We need more people to be aware and to care about this issue. In a world where we are surrounded by statistics and where numbers lose their meaning, we wanted to make people actually care. Our goal was to give people a sense, even if just for a moment, of what it feels like to not have access to clean, potable water.
For many of us water isn't something we think about - you just turn on a tap and it's there. Our biggest obstacle was that we just don't think of this issue because we have no clue what it is like not to have this privilege. This issue, which disproportionately affects women, happens in the developing world and we have no connection to how this impacts their day-to-day life.
How are you supposed to hold down a job if you have to decide each day between going to work or having to walk 6 hours to fetch water? What is more important for your survival - money or water?
If not you, then who do you send? Is it your daughter, your sister, or mother? What if they couldn't get an education because they had to go make the long journey for water - how would that make them feel?
It seems implausible that people actually have to ask themselves these questions.
It became clear that we needed to find a way to bring questions like these into the lives of our audience. We set out to bring the water crisis home and into the lives of our consumers via a social experiment.
In the US alone, the video garnered over 170 million social impressions and on the day of launch it increased social mentions of Stella Artois by 20x.
Our video, Wait for Water, racked up over 22 MM views across social worldwide.
This top performing campaign post drove 3.5 MM engagements and an organic reach in North America of 2.8MM.
And best of all, in reading the comments, consumers expressed eye-opening realizations, appreciation of the powerful message, purchase intent and celebrated the brand for supporting the clean water cause.
