Brita Wants You to Skip This Ad

Matt Kohler, vice president — Marketing

The best storytelling is personal. And despite what you see on social media, it doesn’t need to happen in 6-second clips.

That’s why Brita Canada has documented in painful detail one Kenyan woman’s long, solitary walk to get water for herself and her family.

By sharing Janet Molel’s story, nearly four-and-a-half hours in the walking, we hope to raise awareness about the global problem of access to clean drinking water — and offer ordinary people a way to become part of the solution.

Cue The Walkumentary

Janet is just one of the thousands of women across the world who must walk for hours to access water.

While they walk, they cannot go to school. They cannot earn an education that could help to break the cycle of poverty.

We filmed Janet’s journey to show how incredibly difficult this effort can be. And we’re placing this trek, all 4.5 hours of it, online so you can experience it, too.

Sound brutal? You can skip it with a click of your mouse. And when you buy “Filter for Good” Brita filters and bottles, and you provide someone in Kenya with a full of year of clean water.

“You can skip this. With your help, I can too,” Janet says so eloquently at the start of the Walkumentary.

We hope this super-sized ad highlights the disparity between our first-world lives and Janet’s. Here, we can skip almost anything that seems inconvenient. With this video and call-to-action, we’re using our power to draw attention to the fact that Janet and women like her don’t get to skip it.

Partnering for change

This is our latest effort, in partnership with the NGO Me to WE, to engage ordinary people in solving big problems. We want to show that small choices really can add up to a big difference, and we want to help Canadians make that difference in the world.

Already, over the past two years, this program has paid for a borehole in Irkaat, Kenya, providing over 55,400 people in Kenya with a long-term source of clean water.

That borehole was intentionally built next to the town’s school. Once it was active, attendance at school, especially among girls, skyrocketed. Girls could go to school during the day and return home in the evening with a bucket of clean water.

The results from this program have been excellent so far, creating engagement with consumers and retail partners like Walmart. And it’s an excellent example of how a brand with purpose can drive business results and make a difference in the world.