We see creators post cooking content everyday. But what if a creator didn’t have access to clean and safe water, like 771 million people in the world do not? Our Dirty Water Cooking videos are our take on what that would look like. Our goal was largely focused on new audience engagement and driving single and recurring donations.
The idea started out of a creative brainstorm but we knew to do it right we should partner with proper food content creators. We worked with Corvus Creative for a single day of production and were able to capture three unique pieces of content that would play on TikTok, Meta, and Youtube.
We did not want to telegraph to the audience that they were seeing an ad for a charity so we purposely created these spots with deception in mind. After a few seconds, each spot reveals itself through a shocking statistic or transition.
The tight turnaround and making unsafe water believable on camera was quite the challenge. The food stylist used a combination of dirt, bugs, and plant material to make the dirty water - all things that contaminate the water for over 700 million people in the world.
One spot also showcased the time required for collecting dirty water by warming up the color temperature of the set lights to mimic a large passage of time while the talent walked off screen.
Our goal with all of these spots was to show how the content we see everyday is only possible because of the access to clean water that so many of us take for granted.
Success was largely met through audience engagement. On Facebook we saw 600+ post comments and 1,847 post shares, on TikTok we had a 33% increase in CTR and a 45% increase in average watch time. Our favorite metric though were comments like this:
The campaign has such smart advertising literally so impressed I keep getting tricked by u guys • These ads r v effective - rly makes u think how privileged we are to watch tik toks n not worry about clean water • Needless to say, but you definitely got my attention• Way to use the algorithm to spread the message. Good job guys
