Dirty water is deadly. It infiltrates the lives of over 663 million people every single day and kills more people than all forms of violence – including war. But in America and much of the Western World, we don't even have to consider it. Dirty water is simply not on our radar.
So charity: water gave us a mission: Make dirty water real for people who don't have to drink it.
We brought dirty water home for Americans— or rather, their kitchens.
Introducing UnTasty Dishes, the first recipe ambush ever with Buzzfeed Tasty.
Buzzfeed Tasty's bite-sized videos serve up recipes that make cooking seem effortless – and are highly addictive to watch.
So we decided to give Tasty's 62 million followers a little surprise. In place of clean water in each video, we substituted a developing world reality: dirty water.
Each recipe featured a stomach-churning element of dirty water.
A summertime lemonade infested with leeches. A toxic algae cornbread best served with a stomach pump. And a Typhoid bacteria smoothie bowl, disinfected with bleach.
Each video mirrored the Tasty style, catching our audience off-guard when they realized these weren't your average Tasty videos. Instead of serving up a typical recipe, we delivered a message that was hard to swallow – that 663 million people still live without access to clean water.
With zero media spend, UnTasty Dishes garnered over 5 million views in the first two weeks across Facebook and Snapchat. Almost 8 thousand people shared our videos and we sparked conversation over 3.5 thousand times. People loved, wowed, and liked our video over 20 thousand times.
In the end, UnTasty Dishes took the global perils of dirty water and put it right on our audiences' plates.
