The challenge: Severn Trent Water wanted to drive awareness about the importance of preventing water wastage amongst primary school children and their families, as well as raise the profile of their water company and its services. Their objectives: reach over 100,000 primary school children over the course of a year.

The idea: Water treatment can be seen as a pretty dry topic, so we needed to educate kids and their families in a way that would fire up their imaginations. We also needed to ‘meet’ our young audience where they were ‘hanging out’, and where they were ‘hanging out’, was in Minecraft!

The solution: We created the ‘Wonderful Water Tour’ a live roadshow which comprised of two interactive touring buses, the Digibus, and The Experibus. For The Digibus, we partnered with Minecraft to create a customised virtual world, an intricate pixel-based version of the Severn Trent’s facilities that kids could explore.

Building water works on such a vast scale in Minecraft was a huge undertaking, but the attention to detail made the Wonderful Water Tour unforgettable.

We also used VR to allow children to journey through the sewers and water treatment processes that lie behind every drop, and to see how water travels from the plant through to their homes in a fun, engaging way that spoke to the kids on their level.

The second bus was The Experibus. In here, kids got to play with a real water-themed environment. Through dress-up, they also got learn about the many career possibilities that exist within the water industry, from scientists to call centre operatives and engineers. There was also radio-based game they could play.

Making it extraordinary: The real success of this immersive digital and experiential roadshow was the combined power of the virtual and physical techniques used to entertain and educate the kids.

The campaign and the bespoke Minecraft world in particular, offered an unforgettable and – most importantly – a fun way to showcase the wonder of water to every school in the Severn Trent region.

If you’d like to create a customer-facing platform or roadshow that uses virtual and physical experiences to educate or share your brand messaging, give us a shout. We help you tap into new markets and results using the latest technology.

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