Drought’s Still Here, Ads Warn : Conservation: A stormy month cannot reverse a five-year dry spell, water officials say. Some utilities are hoping media campaigns will help persuade.

Up and down the state, officials have the same problem: how to sell the drought to people who have been drenched by a month of storms.

As a new storm blew in the other day, San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos made the point by telling reporters how he is trying to conserve at home by training his 9-year-old son not to flush the toilet, and by pointing out that the city reservoir won’t hit capacity until another 50 inches of rain falls.

In Southern California, advertising wizards have fashioned a $6-million campaign that includes an attention-grabbing take-off on the shower scene in “Psycho.” In May, water awareness month, California school children will be inundated with tips on conservation that, it is hoped, will spread to their parents, said Rita Sudman, executive director of the Water Education Foundation.

Gov. Pete Wilson hopes to persuade Hollywood celebrities to make the point that a few weeks of wet weather won’t solve a shortage that took five years to create.

But as it is, with each new storm, people naturally wonder when restrictions will be lifted. In San Diego, Mayor Maureen O’Connor, among a growing list of officials found to be using large amounts of water, complicated matters when she declared the drought to be over.

“The mayor is very good at getting her point across,” said Shirley Jackson, assistant general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority. “But to send out the signal that the drought is over is just incorrect. The drought is not over.”

To drive home the point that California’s reservoirs remain about half full, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power poured $2.5 million into an advertising campaign and came up with the shower-scene commercial, complete with an Anthony Perkins sound-alike narrator, that ends with a scream over a shockingly high water bill.

Customers “love the ads or hate them,” said the DWP’s Barry Tuller. But given the severity of the shortage, he said, there was a need for a campaign that people would notice, he said.

The DWP’s advertising campaign will return with a “Psycho II” spot that will play in movie theaters this summer.

But for now it is on hiatus while the Metropolitan Water District premieres its ads in a $3.5-million blitz. The MWD radio spots, scheduled to begin on April 1, will explain that the spring storms have not solved the water shortage.

Television spots will carry the same theme starting on April 15, featuring footage of reservoirs in Northern California that are 150 feet below normal.

“I’ve spent my career trying to get people to consume a product,” said Rick Sale, the adman from Eisaman, Johns & Laws who created the MWD campaign. “Now, I’m trying to get them not to consume.”

The MWD initially had planned to open its campaign in the summer. But when officials realized the depth of the water problem, they tossed an extra $1 million into the budget and started the push early, spokesman Bob Gomperz said.

“The consumer had to have help--and motivation,” Gomperz said.

The MWD effort will include 400 billboards with water-saving tips, including that most basic of concepts--that people should not use water from a garden hose to clean their sidewalks. “Sweep the driveway instead and save 150 gallons,” says the billboard message set to go up at the start of April.

“There are a few people who have their head in the sand--and it is sand and not mud--on that particular issue,” Sale said.

In Northern California, where showers are short and lawns are left to turn brown soon after the rain ends, the sight of someone watering a sidewalk would send any concerned citizen running to a phone to call a water cop.

“We’re spending a ton of money to make sure Southern Californians are as wise and judicious about water as people are in Northern California,” Sale said.

Unlike Southern California, which draws on many sources for its water, most districts in Northern California get water from a large reservoir, or a few small, local basins.

For 2 million people in San Francisco and on the San Francisco Peninsula, the source is Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park. In the East Bay, 1.2 million people draw from a reservoir on the Mokelumne River.

As a result, one dry year is felt quicker and authorities are always at the ready to restrict use. For some Northern Californians, this will be the fifth straight year of rationing. And with rationing comes heightened awareness.

In Marin County, where people pay hefty fees for using more than 50 gallons a day, water district spokesman Jules Tham said he took out an ad in the local paper a month ago urging conservation, and got calls from people “who couldn’t believe I was wasting money on that.”

“They all knew it,” Tham said. “In Marin and most other Bay Area water districts, we have been on a serious conservation program for years.”

At the East Bay Municipal Utility District, spokeswoman Artis Dawson set her sights on a low-key advertising approach. She is trying to persuade other Bay Area water officials to pool their money in a modest $125,000 campaign saying that the drought continues.

But, she noted, East Bay water users have been cutting consumption since 1988, back when few authorities in the state considered the possibility of a lasting drought. The district intends to reduce consumption even more, to about 70 gallons per person during the dry, summer months, Dawson said.

For all the money and time being spent convincing people that water is in short supply, marketing experts question whether heightened awareness will ever get translated into long-term solutions.

“Memory is short,” said David A. Aaker, professor of marketing strategy at UC Berkeley. “What you really need is some leadership. You need someone who has a vision and can communicate that vision.” Unless public officials strive for long-term solutions, the opportunity will be lost, he said.

To this end, Gov. Wilson is turning to Hollywood, and has received tentative commitments from a few broadcasters and entertainers to help in a public relations campaign, starting in April, to educate water users, said Otto Bos, Wilson’s communication director. Details are still being worked out.

But given the support and the higher awareness of water issues, 1991 could turn out to be “the year of water,” when long-range solutions emerge to help solve water-supply problems, Bos said.

In San Francisco, Mayor Agnos convened a press conference and admitted that he, like San Diego Mayor O’Connor and Gov. Wilson, was using more than his allotted water.

He also displayed a variety of water-saving devices and took reporters to the City Hall basement, where the control panel for the landscaping sprinklers is locked tight. Still, he noted, with dark clouds overhead, people may start relaxing their conservationist ways.