Texas picks Austin ad icon for water awareness push
An Austin advertising legend who once helped sell “Don’t mess with Texas” is now working with state officials on a sequel: a campaign to get Texans to cherish water, from their lakes to their sinks.
Roy Spence, one of the founders of ad giant GSD&M, is partnering with Texas State University’s Meadows Center for Water and the Environment and the Texas Water Development Board on the project, which is still in its early stages.
With a crush of people moving to Texas — the population is expected to increase by 70 percent over the next half-century — the state predicts that without new infrastructure and conservation projects, roughly one-third of Texans will have less than half the water supplies they require during severe drought conditions.
For now, the research part of the campaign — quizzing Texans about how they feel about water — has been paid for by a San Antonio
foundation. But state officials are hoping the Legislature or a coalition of water utilities or businesses will pony up money for a full-fledged ad campaign.
The partnership was struck last year, in the aftermath of a speech that Spence gave at the annual Water for Texas conference, which is organized by the Water Development Board, an obscure state agency that essentially acts as a bank to finance reservoirs, pipelines and other water projects.
In the funny, moving speech — one that covered in emotional detail how Spence helped care for his sister with spina bifida to the comic details about how he came by the ad agency’s first bank loan — Spence came off as a cross between Bill Clinton and Matthew McConaughey.
Despite the $10,000 speaker’s fee he was paid, the talk had the feel of a pitch for agency work, with the mesmerizing magic of a Don Draper presentation.
“If you don’t let the people of Texas know what’s at stake, you’re cheating them of the opportunity to make a better Texas,” he told the crowd of several hundred people.
As examples, he showed several “Don’t mess with Texas” spots, including ones with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Willie Nelson, that were credited with cleaning up roadsides and beaches around the state.
Since 1985, the Texas Department of Transportation has spent about $2 million per year on the famed ad campaign. A 2013 study commissioned by TxDOT found that litter along Texas roads had declined 34 percent since 2009, and the state agency credits the campaign with reducing litter on Texas highways by 72 percent between 1986 and 1990.
Spence linked the work of the Water Development Board, and water utilities generally, to a greater purpose.
“Can I help y’all?” he told the group of water experts. “I wrote a theme line: ‘It’s Texas, dammit. We’ve got oil and we’ve got gas and we’ve got technology and we’ve got people. We’ve got to have water so we can kick butt forever.’ Something like that.”
Spence was invited to talk at the conference by fellow Brownwood native and state agency head Jeff Walker — who counted Spence’s mother, a high school civics teacher, as one of his favorite instructors.
Officials at the Water Development Board and the Meadows Center began meeting informally with GSD&M in July 2017 to discuss and develop a statewide water education campaign to shift Texans’ opinions about the value of water.
An interagency agreement signed late last year called for Texas State to execute a contract with GSD&M to build a campaign that will cultivate tools, techniques and a targeted approach that will “resonate with audiences across Texas and transform their valuation of our most precious natural resource and change water use behaviors.”
“Water is an essential part of every Texan’s daily life, yet most do not think about water and the value of water very often,” the document said. “The rapidly expanding population of Texas is causing many of our existing water resources to become overburdened.”
For now, Texas State is providing the money to develop the campaign — its Meadows Center received a $55,000 grant from the Ewing Halsell Foundation of San Antonio and is expecting to raise an additional $35,000 to finish the project — and the Water Development Board is contributing staff time.
The agreement calls for the two state entities to “pool resources” and “leverage external funding.”
Where that external money will come from remains an open question.
In 2007, as the state emerged from a devastating drought, the Legislature ordered the Water Development Board to “implement a statewide water conservation public awareness program to educate residents of this state about water conservation.”
But the Legislature has never fully funded the program.
The closest lawmakers came was a one-time appropriation of $1 million in 2013 to provide grants to water conservation education groups.
Things could change this legislative session — especially if drought sets in again, pushing the issue to the forefront of lawmakers’ minds. Directed to examine a public awareness campaign on water issues, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on the matter this fall.
“I want people to value water,” Walker, the water board’s director, said in an interview. “Whether that’s coming out of a tap, fishing on it, looking at it — I want them to value water for its worth. Then they’ll be willing to pay more for it.”
He said Texans tend to pay more for their cellphones than their water — but if their water bill goes up by $5, “they’re now picketing City Hall.”
“A lot of people will think water is a right, so it should be cheap,” he said.
“The way Texas is growing, we can’t conserve our way out of needing more water,” he said. “We need to develop more water resources, including reservoirs,” underground storage and desalination plants.
Not everyone thinks that’s right; some environmentalists say Texas could save vast amounts of water by further restricting lawn watering, for example.
“That’s going to be one of the things most interesting as it proceeds,” said Andrew Sansom, head of the Meadows Center.
“Everybody has their own idea of what a campaign like this should accomplish. Some people want to get people to agree to pay more for water; others want to get people to conserve more water.”
Results from an initial survey, paid for by the San Antonio foundation, suggest the state might have its work cut out for it. When it comes to attitudes about water, 14 percent of Texans fall into a “not my problem” category and 25 percent into a “why change my ways?” group.
“Don’t mess with Texas,” which focused on uniform messaging across the state, might not be the best model for a water campaign, said Valerie Salinas-Davis, CEO of Enviromedia, which used to handle the “Don’t mess with Texas” account.
“Our research shows the more people know about the natural source of their water, the more efficient they’re going to be with their water use,” Salinas-Davis said. “So it’s critical to start by educating people about where their water comes from.”
That kind of message is different, of course, if you live in Austin and your water comes from the Colorado River instead of living in El Paso or Nacogdoches.
Salinas-Davis said the Water Development Board hired Enviromedia in 2004 for a campaign that would be of similar caliber to “Don’t mess with Texas.” The company’s initial research found that only 28 percent of Texans knew their water source.
“We really didn’t believe a celebrity-oriented approach would be the answer, but we suggested being creative, having fun with it and have high-quality ads to educate Texans about where their water comes from,” she said.
Without money from the Legislature, however, the agency never issued a request for proposals for such a campaign, she said.
Meanwhile, water source awareness for the North Texas Municipal Water District, a wholesaler Enviromedia represents, jumped from 30 percent to 43 percent — a shift Salinas-Davis credits with regional advertising on valuing water sources around the Metroplex. The campaign reduced peak water demand, even as the population in the region has increased 65 percent, she said.
That kind of water management is key for big businesses that need to know water is dependable.
“Toyota can’t be up there and not have access to clean, reliable water,” she said.