Gavin Sheppard, former CMO at Smart Energy GB joined us in Manchester to share a case study where magazine media delivered for the energy meter company.

With a brief to transition 26m homes to smart meters in the context of the fact that consumers spend less than one minute on average per year thinking about their home energy supply, Smart Energy GB certainly faces a challenge when it comes to engagement.

While interest among its target audience is low overall, understanding was weakest among younger people. However, Smart Energy GB identified a high potential for conversion among this group as once they grasped the concept, they were quick to adopt – the challenge was how to get their attention.

Cosmopolitan’s answer to the brief, centred on The Power of 10p, was a creative, multi-platform campaign featuring real readers challenging each other to get ready for a night out with just 10p of energy between them. It achieved a four-minute dwell time (compared with a Facebook benchmark of two seconds) and a third of people even took action and contacted their supplier about installing a smart meter.

“It was brought to life in a way that was authentic to the publishing brand, authentic to us and really made sense for those readers. The results were great: really good engagement, great dwell time.”

Some of the key learnings, said Gavin, were the flexibility of magazine brands, their cross-channel strength, the value of high-quality attention and the influence of trusted voice but the most important was the power of collaboration between agency, publisher and client.

Check out all the pictures from Spark here.

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