Tap Project

March 6th Update

Tangible is now officially a part of the Tap Project's stable of agency supporters! We have been put in charge of doing a street-level consumer and bar/club/venue/restaurant awareness campaign, consisting of flyers, posters, volunteer recruitment, a special artist collaboration featuring limited edition posters from artist across the nation for auction and for sale online -- all proceeds to be donated to UNICEF (coming soon), and even one or two fundraising events -- including an after party for the media event and, possibly, a wrap-up party (TBA). We have very little time to pull everything together, but we have made MAJOR headway since we first asked to get involved. We are all very excited and ask that everyone that knows us helps spread the word! We will have a lot of updates coming next week, so please stay tuned.

Also, Merrick, our president/cd and biggest proponent for our involvement in the project, is also throwing out a challenge to other executives to join him for a special kick-off dinner. The plan is to eat a fine meal, and at the end, each person will donate at least $5,000 a piece!!! Playa, playa! Interested? Contact Merrick through our website.

And finally, you can help us spread the word by downloading our final, UNICEF approved posters here. Feel free to print them out and distribute as you feel necessary. We will have a very limited edition silkscreen version coming soon, along with other options, in our artist poster series collab mentioned above.

Every day, 5,000 or more kids die from not having clean water to drink. A nationwide effort is launching during World Water Week called the Tap Project, a campaign that celebrates the clean and accessible tap water available as an every day privilege to millions, while helping UNICEF provide safe drinking water to children around the world. For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days.

Our sister agency, Lakonic, has signed on as an agency supporter, alongside Energy BBDO, Droga5, Barbarian Group and long list of other agency and other supporters across the country. We have buddied up with Energy BBDO/Chicago to do Chicago's digital side of the campaign, including a small piece on the tapproject.org website, animations that will live on elevator screens across the city and upcoming online media.

Tangible Worldwide is trying to throw its hat into the ring by doing a street campaign, including posters, flyers and other community outreach programs. We'd also like to produce, distribute throughout the city and sell these flyers online, donating all proceeds to the project. Of course, there's a bit of red tape involved, so we may end up having to use some "unofficial" guerrilla muscle to get this work into cycle in time — but hey, it worked for Ray on his beautiful (as always) work for Obama.

The poster concept plays cleverly off of the Chicago river. For those of you not familiar with Chicago history, the flow of the river was actually reversed in 1900 due to a typhoid epidemic. So, the primary graphic is a large water drop made out of smaller, upward flowing water drops and a reverse image of the Chicago skyline with the Water Tower — the only surviving building in the Chicago fire — at the base.

Creative

In the first piece, we simply used the headline "The Water Problem" and mirrored — or reversed, da da ching! — the lettering, so it effectively reads "Reverse The Water Problem."

The second and third pieces play off the timeframe during which the World Water Week happens: St. Patrick's Day. Chicago's pretty crazy about St. Patty's Day and during the parade, boats flood the river with bright green dye. The color tends to fade back to its normal coloring after a few days. So we used a green to blue gradient on the water drops and a March 16th?March 22nd timeline to represent the connection. Two headlines, "This Year, Let's Celebrate Clean Water" (with the "clean" colored in green to get the wordplay) and "Green Water Should Be A Choice" (with the same green to blue fade).

Your Opinion

We feel the artwork and messaging will speak very loudly to the Chicago community and, from what we've seen of the other campaigns, will take a totally different spin on the more traditional advertising methods currently being used.

We want to know what you think. Would you buy one? Would you help us plaster this around the city? Would you hang them in your establishment? Click here to share your thoughts.