Can Branding Sex Up Tap Water?
City officials in Venice have come up with a novel plan for getting consumers to break the bottled water habit: they've branded their tap water Acqua Veritas and created a slick ad campaign around it.
Consumers in Italy drink more bottled water than any place in the world. To avoid drowning in a sea of its own trash, Venice came up with the campaign, not-so-quietly touting its tap as originating deep underground in the same region as the popular bottled water brand San Benedetto.
Is it working? Yes and no.
In terms of trash reduction, the Acqua Veritas campaign has already been a success, Venetian officials calculate, reducing the amount of plastic trash over all to 261 tons a month now from 288 tons a year ago...
Still, the campaign to promote the mayor's water has made little headway with restaurants and stores, which make money selling bottled water.
I don't know much about Venice's mayor but, here in New York, when restaurants started referring to tap water as "Guiliani Water" several years ago, it was almost enough to make me pay for the bottled stuff. Almost.
"City Known for Its Water Turns to Tap to Cut Trash" [New York Times]
Carrie McLaren & Jason Torchinsky are coeditors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. In previous lives, they worked together on the hopelessly obscure and now defunct Stay Free! magazine .
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Comments:
Well I am not sure if branding it will sex it up or not, but going by recent articles, I bet sexing up the brand sure does help (apparently).
I believe Penn & Teller already covered bottled water. Most of it is no better (and sometimes worse) than what comes out of your tap.
Many of them are actually just bottled tap water.
Interesting to note: Bottled water sold in the same state is not subject to most inspections, so a big YMMV.
MONEY SAVING TIP: Why not just get a filter pitcher and bottle your own?
@doctor_cos: Here is a picture of bottled water and what comes out of my tap. I'll let you guess which is which:
Some tap water - Manhattan's, or Venice's - is shockingly good. People in those cities are being conned by buying "premium" bottled water.
Other cities - Los Angeles, I'm looking at you - tastes awful. Filter systems are mandatory, or failing that (by a large margin), bottle water has appeal.
The people taking both situations as the same and shrilly screaming Bottled Water Is A Scam aren't very thoughtful people.
Again, a Brita or Pur filter is vastly preferable to bottles. But my main point - cities vary in their tap water drinkability - stands.
@StruckBySmoothCriminal_GitEmSteveDave:
So, you don't have to eat as much leafy greens.
Where I grew up, everyone had wells, and water came in some combination of the following four flavors: iron, sulfur, silt, and (all-natural!) arsenic. Municipal water is almost entirely non-objectionable to me.
There IS a good reason to buy bottled water (or bottled anything, but water tends to be cheaper if you aren't buying it from Coke, Pepsi, or worse)...it comes with a bottle, and you can reuse them.
And it's usually cheaper to buy a bottle full of water than it is to buy an empty bottle.
@TechnoDestructo: We have carbon as well, so little flecks of black occasionally.
BTW, the lines you see in the glasses are from me washing them w/my titanium ring on and scratching a line.
@Trai_Dep: It depends where you are in Los Angeles actually. LA actually won best municipal water at the 18th annual Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting... but I think they must have gotten the water from it's source in the mountains and not inland where all the pipes and crud and smog make it taste like butt.
@TechnoDestructo: There has been some discussion that reusing plastic water bottles could be dangerous... [environment.about.com]
Wasn't Pepsi sued earlier this year or last year for not disclosing that their bottled water is just tap water?
Instead of advertising why aren't they replacing water mains and distilling or at least better filtering the water? The reason people drink bottled water is that municipalities are too cheap invest in the water system, preferring to use almost all funds collected to fund their pay raises.
@TechnoDestructo: We have really hard, mineraly water where I live, and I actually really like it. If this were Europe, they'd bottle it and sell it, unfiltered, for its mineraly goodness. Here half the town just whines about it and pays Mineral Spring to deliver them office-water-cooler-thingies.
The only part I DON'T like is where it etches my glasses and spots my silverware, but everyone in town has the same problem so nobody thinks you're a bad hostess.
@StruckBySmoothCriminal_GitEmSteveDave: YMMV with tap water - Portland, OR's tap water is pure mountain spring water from Bull Run - access is banned to the watershed to all but Portland Water Bureau employees.
However, when the pure water hits 80-year-old pipes, it turns into your water. But I never will have anemia...
@Trai_Dep: I remember seeing a CR special a long time ago, and NYC tap water was rated the same as the top-rated bottled waters.
I am perfectly happy with good old NYC tap water. I think they even bottle it, too.
@morlo: Apparently they did so years ago (Venice water used to be brackish, which is no surprise considering the city's location). The water tastes fine from the tap now. But it was too late ... by then the bottled water habit had taken firm hold. Italians LOOOOOOOVE the bottled water. Love. It. They buy cases of it at a time, 6-packs of the big 1.5-liter bottles wrapped in plastic. They leave us Amuricans in the dust on this score. (They particularly love the fizzy kind, which of course you can't get out of the tap anyway ...)
@Newman!!!!: I can see that: LA's a big locality.
And, I should add, LA water is SAFE, and fine once you filter the chlorine taste out.
But a single tear wells up and slowly drips down my cheek every time I see a film placed in NYC that features characters nonchalantly sipping from the tap.
@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): What color is your shower? If you ignore the hair from the dog I had just bathed, mine is multi colored!
@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): they don't like the mineral flavor of the tap water so they pay... Mineral Spring... to deliver water? ummmmm.... yeeeeaaaah
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Acqua Giuliani is served in only the finest Italian restaurants.