Creative Juices Flow for Pro Bono Effort to Aid Global Water Projects

LIKE the ripples from a drop of rain when it falls on a pond, a charitable campaign created last year by a New York boutique agency is arriving next month in more than a dozen other cities, and there are plans to expand it globally in 2009.

The water simile is apt, because the campaign benefits efforts by Unicef to provide clean drinking water to children in the third world. Thirteen agencies and the Adcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University are joining forces with the Droga5 boutique, which originated the campaign, to produce the 2008 version.

New York is returning for a second year of the campaign. Additional markets scheduled to take part are Boston; Chicago; Cincinnati; Dallas; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; New Orleans; Portland, Ore.; Richmond, Va.; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and several cities in South Carolina.

The campaign, called the Tap Project (tapproject.org), encourages diners at participating restaurants during the week of March 16 to donate $1 each time they order local tap water instead of bottled water. Thousands of patrons at 300 or so New York restaurants took part in the first Tap Project last March, raising about $100,000.

Three months later, the campaign won Droga5 a prestigious award for creative innovation, known as the Titanium Lion, at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France. That got the attention of other agencies and helped the United States Fund for Unicef recruit other shops to collaborate with Droga5, part of the Publicis Groupe, on an expanded version of the campaign for 2008.

“The work highlighted in Cannes was such a brilliant, simple and disruptive idea,” said Erica Hoholick, group account director at one of the participating agencies, the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day.

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