A Breakthrough Campaign for a Utilities Consultancy

There are a few large and highly visible industry events that bring together decision-makers, and they are the best opportunity for companies like Sure Power to generate leads. The challenge is setting yourself apart in a cluttered event to earn an introduction to new clients. The leadership at Sure Power recognized that they needed to do something different and provocative, and challenged us to come up with a campaign.

We decided to lean into the stereotypes of consulting companies to engage potential clients and show that Sure Power understands what they want (and don’t). The industry tends to be pretty serious and formal, filled with buzzwords and insider acronyms that consultants use to posture as the true experts. But in many cases, consultants have earned a bad reputation for over-promising, under-delivering, and charging an arm and a leg for mediocre services. Sounds like a great opportunity, right?

Sure Power purchased a full-page ad and a booth for this event, but we needed to create a campaign that would earn them much more exposure. So we created a fake company that embodied all of the negative stereotypes of industry consultants, using their marketing to promote Sure Power. It allowed us to create highly engaging, irreverent campaign that earned way more attention than a traditional campaign, but ultimately pointed to Sure Power as the real experts.

We started with a full-page Ad that we split into two half-page ads. The top half promoted Sure Power, and the bottom half was for the fake company who (in our fairy-tale story) went out of business because of Sure Power’s clearly superior solution. Then we took it a step further, creating a website that industry insiders would instantly recognize (and laugh at) as a microcosm of all that is wrong with consultants. We produced a video from the “CEO” of the troubled company, which was essentially a smear campaign against Sure Power and a last-ditch effort to try to convince viewers to choose them over Sure Power.

The results of this campaign were amazing. The host of the event, a 20-year industry veteran, said that this was the most “innovative and best campaign” she had ever seen. When the rest of the organizers saw what we did, they invited the CEO of Sure Power to present the campaign in front of the entire conference. It opened up a constant stream of conversations during and after the event, and was responsible for quality leads. We’re thankful that the Sure Power leadership trusted us and decided to “swing for the fences”, giving us the green light time and time again on crazy ideas that made this campaign memorable and effective.