Title	GORILLAZ X E.ON: A SOLAR COLLABORATION
Brand	E.ON
Product/Service	SOLAR STORAGE
Category	F01. Artist as a Ambassador for a Brand or a Cause
Entrant	ENGINE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	ENGINE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement	VIZEUM GLOBAL London, UNITED KINGDOM
PR	ENGINE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	BLINK London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production 2	NINETEENTWENTY London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Aaron McGurk & Chris Lapham	Engine	Creative Director
Billy Faithfull	Engine	Executive Creative Director
Polly Jones, Albert Ponnelle, Cat Melville, Amy Dick	Engine	Account team
Bradley Woodus	Engine	Producer
John Crowther, Matthias Gray	Engine	Strategy Director, Senior Strategist

The Campaign

Although the innovative changes E.ON had made were crucial for its business, for millions of energy users across Europe they couldn’t have been less interesting. We knew that the brand had worthwhile stories to tell—smart, innovative products that were genuinely shaping a better future—but if the storyteller was a conventional energy company, delivering them through traditional channels, the spark died and interest waned. To truly engage the world with its new vision, E.ON needed to make people feel like no energy company had made them feel before and this required a completely unprecedented approach. In a media landscape already saturated with content, however compelling E.ON’s stories were, they were unlikely to engage consumers through traditional media. So we decided to bring E.ON into the media that consumers were already consuming. For the first time ever, we set out to make a utility company a part of popular culture.

Creative Execution

Beyond the film itself, we created a whole ecosystem of additional content with huge share-ability, extending the engagement and explaining more about E.ON’s technology. This content didn’t just live digitally. We also created the ‘E.ON Kong Solar Studio’, a solar powered recording studio, based on the band’s original Kong Studios and kicked off a tour of European festivals at Gorillaz Demon Dayz Festival in Margate. Using the power generated by E.ON solar PV panels, Kong Studios came to life at night when it hosted recordings by upcoming local talent, who’s tracks appeared on a dedicated soundcloud page as well as the E.ON website, broadening our reach still further

We set out to catapult the E.ON brand into popular culture—and we succeeded. Gorillaz fans went wild for the content as thousands shared our video organically and thousands more visited the Kong Studios at Gorillaz Demon Dayz Festival in Margate. Suddenly, the world was interested in E.ON’s solar powered technology. Suddenly, for a faceless energy supplier, E.ON actually seemed pretty cool. Our film was viewed over 100.5 million times, reaching 78 million. Over 239,000 hours of content were viewed in total, increasing E.ON’s website traffic by 8.1%. This resulted in an 146% lift in brand interest and a 97% lift in creative interest in the UK, with even higher spikes in markets such as Italy which saw a 443% increase in brand interest and 243% in creative. Most importantly, our campaign shifted perceptions of E.ON from a boring utility company to an enabler of amazing energy solutions by 94%.

The E.ON x Gorillaz musical collaboration successfully shifted perceptions of E.ON from a dull faceless utility provider, to a relevant part of popular culture, by creating content that the public went out of their way to engage with. Not only did our branded content drive website traffic (up 8.1%), increase creative interest (up 84%) and increase perceptions of the brand as smart and sustainable (up 94%), it was also highly praised by Gorillaz fans and the wider music industry itself, with many recognising it as world class music video in its own right.

To successfully launch the E.ON brand into popular culture, we knew we needed to partner with influencers that were already a cornerstone of culture in their own right—influencers who would make our content intrinsically shareable. To ensure our content remained authentic and relevant, we also knew that we needed to align this partnership with E.ON’s own brand values. So we approached Gorillaz, a band who champion sustainability and epitomised the innovation, creativity and broad appeal of the new E.ON. We then turned to E.ON’s new products, starting with their pioneering solar and battery storage technology. Using social media to host our stories, at the heart of the campaign we created an online film featuring over 1000 dancing toys, set to the track ‘We Got The Power’ from Gorillaz new album. It was a music video unlike anything Gorillaz fans had seen before—a music video powered entirely by the sun.