Ever bought a car from an energy company?
This summer, we rocked down to Electric Avenue. And we’re very excited to show off what we came back with. We give you: Electric Adventures!
To support our client EDF Energy’s brand new electric vehicle (EV) offering, we created a film series celebrating the Great British road trip. EDF Energy are already the UK’s largest producer of low-carbon energy, so we were excited (and proud!) to get involved as they expand into low-carbon travel.
Electric Adventures is an influencer-led six-part series featuring influencers like Jim Chapman, Mother Pukka and The Michalaks. The campaign’s purpose is to raise mass UK awareness that EDF Energy now provides an end-to-end solution for electric vehicles.
Each episode features a classic British road trip – with a twist. We gave each influencer an electric car and filmed their electric adventure – busting myths along the way about what it’s like to drive and run an electric car.
How we did it
EDF Energy asked us to help them understand the EV marketplace from a customer’s perspective and to launch their new, market leading proposition.
As part of the creative development, we ran an analysis of the current state of the content in the EV market, and EDF Energy competitors (energy companies, car manufacturers) to see what we could do that would be truly compelling.
We compared search volumes against the quality and breadth of this content, and could see that the anxieties consumers had about EVs were not being answered in an easy-to-understand way.
Electric Adventures and its supporting hub and hygiene content targets these keywords and anxieties: continuing the conversation about EV choices and challenges through an ongoing social media workstream, regular blog articles and SEO optimisation to meet varying customer needs.
The result is a relentlessly customer-first and data-led campaign.
The influencers
We wanted to work with a group of people who could experience driving an EV for the first time, so we could capture their real reactions and make something truly authentic. We used customer and persona data to be able to find digital influencers who had the audiences we wanted to speak to.
In total, we used nine influencers across six Electric Adventures episodes. And collectively, their combined audience across all their social media channels is 20 million people.
Here’s who we worked with:
The Michalaks are a young family of four from Bath who create beautifully produced, creative YouTube videos every Sunday about their daily life. We challenged them to try their absolute hardest to have a relaxing family road trip to Cornwall, over Easter. We gave them a Tesla and asked them to make it all the way to Land’s End. As well as featuring in the brand film, they made this beautiful vlog about their trip too.
Colin is a superstar inventor/maker/stuntman and filmmaker. He builds seemingly impossible things and produces amazing YouTube videos to show his processes. We wanted him to create something using only battery power while on a quest to discover how impressive batteries are nowadays. See if he blew himself up in his episode.
Travel bloggers Yaya and Lloyd have been all over the globe to photograph and blog about the most beautiful places on earth. We sent them into deepest, darkest Wales in a Nissan Leaf to see how they got on. But we paired them with an EV expert to help them out. We’re not totally sadistic.
Jim was Yaya and Lloyd’s EV expert in Episode 3. He’s one of the very first pioneers of YouTube, and one of the most prolific and famous vloggers in the world. As well as being increasingly influential in the sustainability industry, he owns a Jaguar I-Pace which he’s driving in the episode.
Anna (AKA Mother Pukka), her Mum Lucia, (AKA Grandmother Pukka) and her husband Matt, (AKA Papa Pukka), are known for their candid and honest depiction of parenting and family life. Anna and Lucia wanted to go to Brighton on their road trip because they have fond family memories there. They tried to make it a girly trip, but Matt wanted to come too…
Camilla works on various humanitarian projects for charities such as the Halo trust and also works as a bomb disposal expert in war-torn countries. For her road trip, she went back to Scotland where she grew up, to see how many new things she could squeeze into two days. She drove a Hyundai Kona from Edinburgh to Loch Lomond and threw herself out of a plane on the way. Her epic adventure was full of action, and beautiful Scottish scenery.
Filming
We chose Brighton-based film production company Be The Fox to film and produce the series. They’re specialists in branded content, and have worked with an impressive line-up of brands like British Airways, Nissan, and Ford. They’re also great fun to work with!
The series features road trips spanning the UK, from Loch Lomond to Land’s End; Liverpool to the summit of Mount Snowdon. So, as you can imagine, filming was a logistical challenge. Episode 1 was filmed in Cornwall over Easter and we wrapped filming the series in Loch Lomond in the middle of June.
Coordinating the influencers, film crew, cars, finding charge points and navigating the iffy Great British weather posed jeopardy along the way, but our team made sure we always nailed the content.
We used six different cars in the six episodes, kindly loaned to us by EDF Energy vehicle leasing partner Drive Electric, so our production team are now real experts in EVs. A nice byproduct of the work.
Each episode took two days each to film. Members of our creative team including Gareth (Creative director), Stephanie (Content Consultant) and Russ (Producer) were on every shoot to make sure we nailed each episode’s narrative.
You can read more about how we work with influencers here.
Watch the series!
We have loved working on this and are very pleased to share it with you.
Watch the series so far, and stay tuned for more episodes as they’re released throughout summer:
