Hasta La Ideas

DDB New York has created another high-impact campaign for charity WATERisLIFE that turns pop culture on its head, following on from last year’s ‘Hashtag Killer’.

The ‘Kenya Bucket List’ campaign subverts the popular ‘bucket list’ term (which stands for a list of things an individual wants to do before they die). It centres around the phrase to highlight the fact that one in five children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t make it to their fifth birthday due to unsafe drinking water.

The campaign film follows a four year-old Maasai boy, Nkaitole, who has never left his village, as he embarks on his personal bucket list adventure, ticking off experiences such as getting his first kiss, playing football in the national stadium and seeing the ocean for the first time.

The campaign launched via WATERisLIFE’s social channels, and will be accompanied by a series of print ads, each of which will highlight individual bucket list experiences (see some behind-the-scenes photographs below). It will also include video clips in which American children recite their bucket list on Facebook. All donations from the video will help those who appear in it, used to provide clean water and sanitation to Maasai villages.

Last year, DDB and WATERisLIFE’s Hashtag Killer campaign similarly subverted the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag by traveling to Haiti to film locals reading some of the trivial tweets under that label back to their original authors.

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