'Fatberg'

A large mass of solid waste, formed in the sewer as a result of fat, cooking oil, and grease poured down the drain.

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Problem

In September 2017 a ‘Fatberg’ the size of Tower Bridge was discovered beneath

the streets of London. Fatberg’s are more of a problem during the Christmas holidays, when there are 24% more drain blockages (from all that turkey fat!).

Insight

Social media feeds are easily clogged up.

Solution

Raise awareness of the problems of fatbergs by bringing them out of the drains

and sewers, and onto social media feeds instead, to give people a personal experience of being clogged up.

Click images to magnify.

We created an Twitter auto-bot account that automatically replies to Twitter users who use specific Christmas Hashtags in their tweets.

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Those hashtags are the top 10 most popular hashtags at Christmas time. For example, #christmas #merrychristmas #xmas #christmaseve and so on.

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When someone tweets these hashtags the Twitter autobot will reply with a friendly, fat berg based tweet.

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By replying to every tweet containing the popular Christmas hashtags, it will start to gain a lot of attention and have a snowball effect, and start to clog up social media feeds.

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By showing how easy it is to clog up social media, we hope users can imagine how easy it is to clog a sewer.

Sticking with the festive themes and clogging up Christmas, we made the fatbergs hijack traditional Christmas associations with tailored replies.

We thought about parodying Christmas advertising campaigns with images of fatbergs.

Once people are on the social media accounts in the bio's will be a link to the Thames Water Fatberg information page. We wanted these pages to be infographics where the problem and solution is broken down and made easy to understand.

Another idea for social media is an actual size picture that is the length of the fatberg found in London. It means that users can click on the picture and keep scrolling down the photo, reading more stats the further they scroll, helping users to understand the reality of how big Fatbergs are.