Sparkles, a smart water spaniel who confronts dumb humans, is leading a 12-week long television campaign to stop people from doing things that ultimately soil streams and lakes in southeastern Wisconsin. The four 30-second ads, along with a series of 10-second shorts, will begin Wednesday on WITI-6 TV and run through Sept. 23.
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The ad campaign is the brainchild of Sweet Water, formally named the Southeastern Wisconsin Watersheds Trust, and Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network, Root-Pike WIN. The $125,000 campaign was brought to life financially by a grant from the state Department of Natural Resources and matching grants from 29 communities. It was brought to life vocally by comedian Jeff Cesario of Kenosha. The Emmy winning comedian gave Sparkles his voice.
Sweet Water is known for its provocative advertising, and the new campaign with Root-Pike WIN follows suit. In one ad, Sparkles repeatedly squirts water in a man’s face. His crime? Spreading chemicals on his lawn one week after over-fertilizing it. “That burns my butt,” Sparkles says, and he means it literally.
In another ad, Sparkles uses a newspaper to repeatedly slap a man sweeping grass clippings onto the street. Those clippings would eventually cloud and clutter streams and rivers. A third ad has Sparkles giving a woman a treat for picking up her dog’s poop. Yet another ad shows Sparkles rattle a noisy can at a man whose car is dripping oil on the street. At the end of the ads, Sparkles reinforces the lesson by telling the teachable humans, “Clean water is all about proper training.”
“What many residents don’t understand is that anything that washes into storm sewers goes directly into our area rivers and then into Lake Michigan,” said Susan Greenfield, executive director of Root-Pike WIN, in a press release. “That means whenever it rains, dog poop, lawn fertilizer, grass, leaves, car fluids and any other debris on sidewalks, streets and parking lots flow into the waterways.”
Last summer and fall, Sweet Water ran another environmental campaign. To get people’s attention, the campaign displayed four rather repulsive billboards pasted on six billboards in Milwaukee and Greenfield. One billboard showed three young children in a swimming pool with chocolate-colored gobs surrounding them. The gobs were poop.
The tag line on this billboard read: “Pet Poop in the Pool? Make a Splash. Protect our Waterways.”
“We purposely chose a bombastic approach to get people’s attention,” says Jeff Martinka, Sweet Water’s executive director. “Folks don’t have a sense of their role in protecting our lakes and rivers.”
—Larry Sussman
Watch the three other ads below:
