If you don’t know about the ‘Close The Tap’ campaign that was trending yesterday, then you must have been under a dark and lonely rock with no access to social media. In which case, you missed out on some really creative and humorous tweets that were flying around the Twittersphere. We chatted to Pawel Janiak from Native, who was responsible for this campaign, to get a closer look at the details, which included peeing in the shower and showering with someone sexy. Read on.
How did the idea for the ‘Close The Tap’ campaign come about?
We were amazed by how much water an individual actually uses, with the products we use and the things we do daily. Firstly, we felt that we had to communicate this, then we needed to come up with a fresh and quirky way to illustrate how much water we waste and how a small change in habit can make a real difference. Using a real tap was the cherry on top. As much as people love communicating talk-worthy stuff on social media, they’re fascinated with making real things happen.
So how long will it run for?
So the tap got built and at the same time we started designing a beautiful interface for a public-facing site. We decided on a bold number as our target, 10,000 tweets, and decided that the campaign will go on as long as it takes to achieve that number. Water conservation is not easy, and we didn’t just want an easy way out with closing the tap. People are inherently good, and this campaign is all about rallying people up to join us change everyone’s behaviour to decrease our collective water footprint. We’re confident this number will be achieved.
What have the responses been like?
The responses have been phenomenal, and we were blown away when we realized our hashtag was trending in South Africa yesterday morning. We’ve also been featured on Memeburn and creativity-online.com and the hype is sure to continue. The responses and tweets have been almost unanimously positive with many people tweeting over and over again. We’ve also seen some people adopt the #closethetap hashtag as part of environmental nomenclature in their tweets.
Which specific aspects of this campaign would you give credit to regarding the success so far?
Initially, everyone at Native was eager to get the word out and Twitter and Facebook provided us with platforms to express our excitement. That was inevitably the catalyst that spread the idea into the general Twittersphere, if you can call it that. The quirky, clever copy in our suggested tweets has played quite a big part in this, we feel, as people have been very keen to let their friends know about the quirky things they’d do to get onboard the water saving campaign.
The copy was brilliant! Are there any other cool campaigns we should be looking out for from you in the near future?
As for other work coming from the Native offices, we’ve recently launched two campaigns for Nedbank on the Mxit Nedbank portal. The one is a game called Pass The Parcel, that can also be played on passtheparcel.co.za which is a game where you can pass a parcel to friends, who can unwrap it and potentially win prizes, and once it’s been passed around enough times, a surprise awaits inside of the parcel box. The second campaign is the Nedbank Cup online competition for the Nedbank Cup Challenge that is played on the Mxit portal, where users select two teams and can win prizes if they’ve selected teams that keep winning as the challenge goes on.
These sound great! Thanks Pawel, we look forward to keeping an eye on these. Follow Pawel on Twitter here. Make sure you check out the Close The Tap Campaign and select your favourite tweet in order to stop the water wastage.
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