• PR
• Creative
Ocean Bottle asked us to come up with a way to amplify its 1 billion bottle milstone, and show consumers that Ocean Bottle has a tangible solution to the ocean plastic crisis.
The campaign needed to target an older Gen Z / younger millennial audience and place the story in media channels this audience interacted with, rather than product media or environmental-focused titles.
Our solution was to create Acqua Sordida — a fake premium bottled water company with ‘added bits’, but the ‘added bits’ were floating particles of microplastics, showing that the scale of microplastic pollution was now so bad that it was polluting not just the ocean but our bodies, too.
We shot Acqua Sordida in a studio but also in situ on supermarket and corner shop shelves, hijacking the space alongside well-known, single-use plastic bottled water companies.
But, we needed a day to hang it off and settled on a day that is usually one for celebrating relationships rather than ending them — Valentine’s Day. This gave us a tension to push against for media, and kept it fun, which was important for Ocean Bottle.
In the run up to Valentine’s Day, we launched Acqua Sordida with brand-new research, which showed that in the UK adults will get through more than 200 billion single-use plastic water bottles in a lifetime. Alongside the research, Ocean Bottle also added a dedicated page to their website with tips on how to end your toxic relationship with single-use plastic bottles, and a pledge for people to show their support for the campaign and promise to call it quits with plastic bottles.
We activated the story not just in news but also on social media; and to do that, we partnered with lifestyle influencer Emma Jane Palin and TikToker Max Selwood to create content that would get eyes on the campaign and drive relevance with their audience. We also gifted to 20 sustainability-focused influencers, in return for encouraging their followers to take the pledge and share it across their socials.
The campaign secured 30 pieces of coverage across national news, lifestyle and design media and a total influencer reach of over 816,000.
