Xylem Take Steps to Solve Water.

We’re facing a water crisis like never before. Litter is being washed into drains and polluting our waterways, blocking them and causing floods. On top of this, billions of people still don’t have access to safe drinking water and are forced to walk a daily average of six kilometers to reach it. Xylem wanted to continue leveraging their partnership with Manchester City FC and Xylem brand ambassador, Pep Guardiola to tackle these issues head on. We started by introducing the world to Plogging (that’s picking up litter while jogging to you and me), in a bid to stop litter polluting our waterways and blocking our drains. We created an emotive short film with Pep Guardiola to launch ‘Plogging with Pep’ on World Water Day, a challenge on Strava that gave you the opportunity to track your plogs on the fitness app. For World Earth Day a month later, we launched ‘Walk For Water’ after discovering that people in water-scarce countries walk on average six kilometers a day for safe drinking water, the same distance as eighteen laps around the Etihad stadium football pitch. To help raise awareness of this growing problem we worked with Shayo to recount her struggles growing up in water-scarce Nigeria to Manchester City FC players João Cancelo, Raheem Sterling and Jack Grealish as she walked them around the Etihad. All this encouraged people to join our Walk for Water challenge on Strava, inviting people to walk the same six kilometers millions are forced to walk every day in solidarity. Across the campaign, we created a series of content films, pitchside LED displays, and a host of digital/social assets for use on Xylem-owned and club-owned channels. We even worked with influencer Ben Black, to leverage his social following and raise awareness of the ‘Walk for water’ challenge. By the end of the campaign, we’d achieved over 25.5M impressions, resulting in people spending 959,000 hours on Strava completing our challenges (the equivalent of 110 years!), to help Xylem raise awareness of global water issues.