The Globe and Mail- Tide rising against bottled water

April 23, 2010

By Simon Houpt

A viral video can only do so much. Last November, Evian landed in the Guinness World Records when a delightful commercial featuring roller-skating toddlers dancing to a remix of the ’70s hit Rappers Delight scored more than 45 million views on YouTube, making it the most-viewed online ad in the history of the medium.

Since then, the video has been seen perhaps another 50 million times. But at the end of 2009, executives at Evian’s parent company, Danone, which also owns the Volvic bottled water brand, faced a harsher measure of success: After falling 19 per cent the previous year, overall revenue was down another 10 per cent, to €2.58-billion ($3.43-billion).

The problem reaches across the entire industry: Worldwide sales at Nestlé Waters, which owns a dozen brands including Poland Spring and the gold standard of bubbly known as Perrier, fell 5.5 per cent last year after declining 7.8 per cent in 2008. But the recession isn’t the only factor threatening to swamp bottled water.

The industry is a paragon of marketing and branding success. It has turned a tasteless commodity that much of its market can get for free into a business worth about $15-billion in North America alone. Between 1985 and 2006, Americans increased their per capita consumption of bottled water from about five gallons to about 21 gallons. But even as it tries to regain its footing and convince tapped-out consumers to keep spending, the industry is facing a grassroots movement of critics who are increasingly vocal and savvy about marketing their pro-environment and often anti-corporate messages.

In the past two years, at least three feature documentaries critical of the water industry have appeared in North American cinemas, including last year’s Tapped. Flow: For Love of Water, which examines the effects of water privatization on the globe, was nominated at the Sundance Film Festival when it debuted there in 2008, and won the best documentary award at the Vail Film Festival that same year.

And this week, the Canadian operations of Brita, the household water filtration system, stepped up its own campaign against the bottled water industry, spending about $2-million for a heavy buy of a 60-second spot airing on a clutch of prime time shows including American Idol, CSI, The Mentalist and The Biggest Loser. Brita is also an official sponsor of Loser, which does not show any plastic beverage bottles onscreen.

    “ When you want people to make a change, sometimes you have to let the emotion do the talking.”

— Andrew Simon, executive creative director, DDB Canada

The downbeat spot, which has a sentimental acoustic guitar backdrop performed by the indie band The British Columbians, features a series of people going about their day surrounded by small accumulations of empty plastic bottles. In the final shot, a woman in a swimsuit regards the pool she is about to dive into, which is heaving slowly, full to the brim with discarded bottles. An onscreen text reads: “Ever thought about how many plastic water bottles Canadians bought last year?”

The decision to go with a full 60-second spot allowed a slightly enigmatic narrative to play out. “When you want people to make a change, sometimes you have to let the emotion do the talking,” explained Andrew Simon, the executive creative director of DDB Canada, Toronto, which produced the campaign.

And though the company is owned by Clorox, it has taken on the role of David in this fight against Goliath, noting its approximately $60-million in annual sales is dwarfed by the $1-billion Canadians spend on bottled water. Brian Benaissa, the marketing manager of Brita, says sales of its pour-through filter are up about 28 per cent over the past 52 weeks.

John Challinor, the director of corporate affairs for Nestlé Waters Canada, which recently introduced a fully recyclable bottle for its Montclair brand, believes the criticism is inappropriate for the Canadian market. “The opposition we face is largely U.S.-based,” he said. “They use U.S. statistics, which have no relevance,” because of the vast superiority of Canadian municipal recycling programs, some of which are funded by Nestlé.

Further, he took umbrage at Brita’s message. “Brita has been very critical of municipal water systems,” he said. “The Canadian bottled water industry has never done so. We don’t compete with municipal tap water; we compete with other bottled beverages.”

As it happens, today the Canadian Bottled Water Association wraps up its annual three-day conference in Collingwood, Ont., where one of the sessions on offer is media training for industry executives. But one consultant says the heat from the mainstream press is easing. This afternoon, Bob Hidell of Boston-based Hidell-Eyster International will speak about what he sees as a new perspective of environmental journalists. “The environmentalists have always been pro-active. The industry has not. We’ve been afraid to take on bad news in hand-to-hand combat, and I think it’s time, because we do so much good, that people need to understand the facts. Whether they accept them or not, we have to hammer them.”

Still, said Mr. Hidell, the growth of social media, where critical videos spread very rapidly, has presented a unique challenge. “On the Wild West Internet, anything goes,” he said.

So the industry is taking to that wild frontier for itself, and trying to adopt its unique aesthetic and revolutionary methods. Last year, the International Bottled Water Association, based in Alexandria, Va., launched a Facebook page, began a Twitter stream, and launched a YouTube channel, where it posted a dozen videos challenging what it sees as misinformation. One video introduced viewers to owners of small bottled water operations around the U.S., implying the industry is made up of little guys rather than the multinationals like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé, who dominate the headlines. Another featured a teenaged girl credulously interviewing water executives at an industry confab.

“We’ve got to do more on social media,” acknowledges Tom Lauria, vice-president of communications for the IBWA. “We started making videos last summer. The funkier, the better. We’re really looking for hand-held, shaky-camera, down-market.”

“Our stuff is made at a fraction of the budget, not because we don’t have money, but because that’s what you need to speak ‘YouTube.’ ”

Mr. Hidell believes the public’s interest in the battle is waning. Still, on the PR front, the industry’s success can seem limited. Its tweets are often shouted down by a crowd of passionate individuals. And it has to confront a pop culture in which corporate ridicule is an increasingly popular form of entertainment. In January, Corporate Accountability International launched the website opentappiness.org, playing on the Coke slogan Open Happiness, to pressure the company into acknowledging on packaging that the source of its bottled water brand Dasani is municipal water supplies. On Earth Day yesterday, tweeters had a field day with that one.

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