The Final Flush: Saving Great Britains Toilets - Bottled Imagination Skip to main content

Earning links & raising awareness of an endangered species

The UK is about to be caught with its trousers down.

With our client Victorian Plumbing, we launched a national campaign to raise awareness for the fast-declining number of public toilets. We gathered data from all over the UK and found that the national public toilets will be extinct by 2104 – with some due to be extinct far sooner.

A ton of coverage, a government petition, mentions on Loose Women and even a “Sir David Attenborough” video. This digital PR campaign was a true Bottled Imagination campaign.

THE BRIEF

Bathroom retailer Victorian Plumbing came to Bottled Imagination seeking creative campaigns that will earn links and coverage that will cut through the noise. We had a tight timeframe to produce a large creative campaign that had multiple moving parts before the busy Christmas period.

Victorian Plumbing wanted a mixture of both national and regional coverage to hit their target market to increase both their share of voice and strength in the SERPs.

THE CONCEPT

Through analysing different themes in the press, we landed on the concept of public toilets as a keen talking point that is frequently discussed, especially considering the increasing number of closures. Our idea focused on highlighting the rapid pace at which these facilities are shutting down. Through multiple Freedom of Information requests, data scraping, and even the odd email to some confused councils, we obtained the data necessary to establish the rate of decline over the past 20 years. From that, we could precisely forecast when each major UK city would lose its public toilets.

For the creative aspect of this campaign, we settled on WWF spoof posters, labelling toilets as endangered species. We created assets for each city, adding a hyper-localized element that facilitated outreach to both the national press and specific regions.

Alongside the creative visuals, we launched a government petition to raise awareness of the decline in public toilets. Not content to stop there, we enlisted the help of a David Attenborough impersonator for a BBC Earth-style documentary clip.

The results of this campaign speak for themselves, with multiple assets being utilized across a multitude of publications. We didn’t just raise awareness of this problem; we positioned Victorian Plumbing at the centre of the conversation.

THE RESULTS

50

Coverage

2

Petition signatures

1

National TV

88

Linking coverage

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