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Culligan Bets on Water Transformation to Win Modern Workplaces
Culligan's 'It's Just Water Until It's Culligan' is a 2025 film campaign, created by Chicago agency Highdive, that positions Culligan's purified water solutions — including its bottleless cooler — as a meaningful upgrade to everyday hydration, launching first in the United States in April 2025 as the brand's largest marketing investment and first coordinated global campaign in more than 85 years.
The campaign launched in the United States on April 23, 2025, followed by Germany on April 24, 2025, with a United Kingdom rollout planned for later in the same quarter, per reporting by mediapost.com. European distribution broadened in May 2025, with Italy joining the platform on June 23, 2025, according to culligan.it. That sequencing reflects a deliberate international build rather than a market-by-market experiment, marking a structural shift in how Culligan approaches brand-level communication across geographies.
The campaign contains two media assets and centers on a practical, relatable office setting to demonstrate the convenience of Culligan's bottleless cooler. The central proposition — that water is ordinary until Culligan transforms it — runs through both executions. Media channels include broadcast television on NBC's TODAY Show, Peacock, Meta, out-of-home placements, and global digital channels, as reported by mediapost.com and reelchicago.com. By anchoring the campaign in the United States and scaling outward, Culligan signals that domestic consumer behavior around water quality is the proving ground for a globally relevant argument about hydration standards.
Culligan's campaign targets a specific consumer failure: the assumption that water is water. The strategic premise is that complacency about drinking water quality is widespread, and that a single, well-timed creative platform can interrupt that complacency at the moment of habitual consumption — most visibly, the office water break.
The broader category context supports the ambition. The global bottled-water market is estimated at $323.1 billion in 2025 and forecast to reach $539.5 billion by 2034 at a compound annual growth rate of 5.93 percent, according to Fortune Business Insights. In the United States, competition for the premium hydration consumer is substantial. Brands including Brita and Primo Water operate in the filtration and dispenser space, with Brita holding strong household-level recognition and Primo Water holding significant retail and commercial cooler presence. Culligan's bottleless cooler proposition targets the office and workplace segment directly, seeking to dislodge point-of-use assumptions rather than compete on the retail shelf.
The water-filtration systems market is estimated at $42.8 billion globally in 2025, according to gminsights.com, with reverse-osmosis systems forecast to grow at 7.5 percent CAGR through 2034, per kenresearch.com. These figures frame the United States as a high-stakes arena where Culligan's move toward emotional brand-building — rather than feature-led messaging — represents a considered strategic bet. Jordan Hesslein, Director of Global Marketing Strategy at Culligan, has been identified as a key internal architect of the campaign, working alongside Highdive to shift Culligan from product communication toward a values-driven platform centered on transformation and wellbeing in the food and drink category.
Highdive built the creative around restraint. The executions avoid the exaggerated scenarios common to non-alcoholic drinks advertising, instead choosing the mundane office environment as the stage on which Culligan's bottleless cooler can make its case quietly and credibly. Muse by Clio, reviewing the campaign on April 23, 2025, described the work as combining familiar situations with mildly unexpected humor while deliberately avoiding what it called silly jokes or clichés — an editorial characterization that positions the campaign as tonally disciplined within a category prone to overclaiming.
Mark Gross, co-founder and chief creative officer at Highdive, stated that the campaign was designed to create the moment when consumers realize they need not settle for ordinary water — a framing that treats creative ambition as a mechanism for shifting habitual behavior rather than generating awareness alone, as reported by reelchicago.com. That intent is visible in the execution: the office setting is not glamorized, the bottleless cooler is not treated as a hero product shot, and the humor operates at the level of recognition rather than spectacle. The result is a campaign that earns trust through understatement.
Production credits for the full directing and production company roster of 'It's Just Water Until It's Culligan' are not comprehensively documented in publicly available sources. The campaign comprises two film assets, distributed across broadcast, streaming via Peacock, out-of-home, and digital channels in the United States and international markets. The decision to lead with film in 2025 — a medium with strong emotional register in the food and drink space — reflects Highdive's confidence that the campaign's premise is strong enough to carry a longer narrative format without relying on spectacle or celebrity.
No independently verified campaign performance data for 'It's Just Water Until It's Culligan' is publicly available beyond platform-level engagement indicators. The primary asset, titled 'At The Office With Bottleless Cooler,' recorded 60,048 views and 12 likes on its hosting platform, with one comment registered, as documented by Clapboard. These figures represent early-stage exposure consistent with a campaign that launched in April 2025 and was still mid-rollout across the United States and international markets at the time of this writing.
Trade coverage from mediapost.com and reelchicago.com confirms that the campaign represents Culligan's largest marketing investment to date — a qualitative indicator of commercial seriousness that contextualizes the media buy across NBC's TODAY Show, Peacock, Meta, and out-of-home placements in the United States. For a brand re-entering coordinated brand advertising after more than 85 years without a unified international platform, the structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on its ability to sustain message consistency across broadcast, digital, and out-of-home simultaneously.
Clapboard rates 'It's Just Water Until It's Culligan' at 63 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with a clear, defensible strategic premise and disciplined creative execution that is appropriately restrained for the food and drink category, tempered by limited evidence of differentiation at the executional level and modest early engagement metrics relative to the scale of the declared investment.
'It's Just Water Until It's Culligan' is a 2025 global film campaign created by Highdive for Culligan. It launched in the United States on April 23, 2025, positioning Culligan's purified water solutions, including the bottleless cooler, as a transformative upgrade to everyday hydration in offices and workplaces.
Highdive, a Chicago-based creative agency, created the campaign for Culligan. Mark Gross, Highdive's co-founder and chief creative officer, led the creative direction. The campaign represents the first time Culligan has run a coordinated global brand platform, according to reporting by mediapost.com and reelchicago.com.
The campaign launched first in the United States on April 23, 2025, followed by Germany on April 24, 2025. A United Kingdom rollout was planned for later in the same quarter, with European distribution expanding in May 2025 and Italy joining the platform on June 23, 2025, per culligan.it.
Culligan distributed the campaign across NBC's TODAY Show, Peacock, Meta, out-of-home placements, and global digital channels in the United States and international markets. The campaign comprises two film assets and represents Culligan's largest marketing investment to date, as reported by mediapost.com and reelchicago.com.
Clapboard rates the campaign 63 out of 100. The score reflects a clear strategic premise and disciplined, restrained creative execution suited to the food and drink category, balanced against limited executional differentiation and modest early engagement figures relative to the scale of Culligan's declared marketing investment.
Culligan targeted the office environment to reach professionals during routine hydration moments, where complacency about water quality is highest. The bottleless cooler setting made the product's convenience and sustainability credentials immediately tangible, according to Clapboard's editorial analysis, directly addressing workplace wellness priorities in the United States market.
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