Going Coastal

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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Among the agencies producing ads, posters, logos, brochures, lapel pins and other materials for the Tap Project — using the original Droga5 ads as a template — are some of the best-known shops in advertising. In addition to TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group, they include Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, also part of Omnicom; Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies; Saatchi & Saatchi, part of Publicis; and Wieden & Kennedy.

“The idea’s incredibly magnetic and deserves support, whoever came up with it,” said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman at Goodby, Silverstein in San Francisco.

That would be David Droga, the creative chairman at Droga5, who developed the campaign in what he recalled in an interview was “very much a sing-for-your-supper way.”

After Mr. Droga was selected as one of the best and brightest for 2006 by Esquire magazine, the editors asked him to prove why his talent merited honoring.

Mr. Droga came up with the Tap Project as a pro bono campaign centered on increasing the supplies of clean drinking water in third world countries.

The Esquire editors liked the idea enough to give Mr. Droga two pages promoting it in the December 2006 issue. The campaign won the support of Unicef and numerous New York restaurateurs, and came to life last March 22, designated by the United Nations as World Water Day.

“What’s happened is remarkable,” said Jay Aldous, vice president for marketing, communications and corporate partnerships at the United States Fund for Unicef in New York.

“When the idea received the Titanium Lion, there was a lot of buzz,” he added. “People were coming to us and to David; we had momentum from both directions.”

The expansion of the campaign “illustrates the power of how when people take an idea and put their own imprint on it, it grows faster,” Mr. Aldous said. “If we as an organization, with all our rules and regulations, were managing this, we’d be one fraction of where we are now.”

That is not to say everyone’s efforts meet with his approval.

“In a couple of cities, I look at the logos, at their interpretations, and I think: ‘I don’t like it. I would kill it,’ ” Mr. Aldous confided, but they have been approved for the good of the project.

(Asked to identify the agencies, he replied diplomatically, “My lips are sealed.”)

Agencies outside New York are customizing the Tap Project for their local markets in imaginative ways.

In Los Angeles, TBWA/Chiat/Day is creating a logo that puts haloes and wings on drops of water, in tribute to the city of angels. In Chicago, Energy BBDO, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of Omnicom, is working with other Omnicom agencies like Ketchum and OMD on ads featuring a faucet, the words “Est. 1851” (the year the city was founded) and the four stars from the Chicago flag.

More than 40 students worked on the campaign at the Adcenter, based in Richmond, producing a logo with a faucet shaped like the letter “R.”

The logo created for New Orleans by Trumpet Advertising places a drop of water within the fleur-de-lis.

And in Seattle, another Publicis agency, Publicis in the West, is creating a poster that carries this headline: “Average annual rainfall: 36 in. Not everyone in the world is so lucky.”

“We wanted to focus on the one thing that makes us unique — water and how abundant it is,” said Chris Witherspoon, executive vice president and executive business director at Publicis in the West.

Mr. Aldous at the Unicef fund asked the new agencies to contribute at least one idea that was not tried in New York last year.

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In Portland, Ore., Wieden & Kennedy 12, the ad-school arm of the agency, came up with the idea of a party for the 500 to 700 members waiters of the participating restaurants a week before the Tap Project begins.

“The servers are the key to success,” said Byron T. Oshiro, managing director of Wieden & Kennedy 12, “if we can get them on board, make them feel comfortable about asking their customers for donations.” In Chicago, said Al Wyatt, creative director at Energy BBDO, the Tap Project will “tap into, pardon the pun, the neighborhood pubs and bars” along with local restaurants.

And in Los Angeles, TBWA/Chiat/Day, working with Omnicom siblings like OMD and Tequila, is developing a way for cellphone users to donate through text messages.

What does Mr. Droga think of his brainchild now?

“The Tap Project is what I want to be linked to for the rest of my advertising career,” he said. “It would be something if, 10 or 15 years from now, the industry could say we contributed to one of the biggest brands in the world.”

Mr. Droga and other executives acknowledged that Madison Avenue had a reputation for working on innumerable charitable campaigns but also for rapidly shifting focus from one cause to another.

Water is certainly popular now. For example, last November Eric Yaverbaum of Ericho Communications and Mark DiMassimo of DiMassimo Goldstein founded Tappening (tappening.com), which encourages consumers to drink tap water from reusable bottles rather than buying water in plastic bottles.

“You could quibble about the fickleness of advertising people when it comes to causes,” Mr. Goodby of Goodby, Silverstein said. “But you can’t argue with the amount of energy and time being put into this.”

Nor would Mr. Goodby argue about whether his agency ought to work so hard on an idea that originated someplace else.

“I know Droga will have to be my slave on some future project,” he said, laughing.

By STUART ELLIOTT

NY Times