John Eaton, Head of Media Investment, Potential Energy Coalition

As Head of Media Investment, John translates strategy into high impact, cost efficient media programs.

John is a marketing and technology entrepreneur with over a decade of experience helping organisations to understand and move consumers. He’s worked in the public sector with communications teams like Climate Nexus and Art Not War, and as an executive in the private sector delivering marketing and research programs for Fortune 500 global enterprise clients at Ipsos, Mondelez, Fox. John’s start-up expertise includes founding a digital marketing agency, a social advocacy SaaS and a musical artist management firm. His early expertise in digital technologies includes electrical engineering in aerospace and managing, and producing musical artists in the entertainment industry where he participated in Grammy award-winning projects.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johneaton2012/

Potential Energy Company history:

Our Origin Story

In 2017, Founder John Marshall’s 17-year old son locked him in his house for two days. Similar to most in his generation, John’s son felt his dad wasn’t doing enough about climate change. Especially when John was the former Chief Strategy Officer at Lippincott, one of the world’s most respected branding consulting firms, and had many of the tools to help solve the world’s hardest communication problem.

 

The protest worked. In response to his forty-eight hour lockdown, John reached out to his network and began building a team that could sell a much different product: awakening the world to the climate challenge and its solutions. And thus, Potential Energy’s journey began.

Interview

What unique strategies set your business apart from the competition, and how have they contributed to your success?

At Potential Energy we ask ourselves one question everyday: How do you get people to care about climate change.

Data-driven marketing, product sales and business growth are in our DNA. Many of us previously worked in the commercial sector, in global enterprise. From our vantage point we saw a gap in the public sector, specifically in environmental communications – it was clear to us that there has not been enough investment in consumer marketing in the public sector. Not enough good ‘ol advertising. Our observation; you make great policy, but can you sell it?

To get people to care about climate change, we need to tell human stories starring “people like me.”  The messenger often matters more than the message and ads with faces win. Our products are intangibles like ideas, attitudes and policies. When we lead with peoples’ identity, rather than our issue, support follows.

We delivered our most successful campaigns by having a mom share a message about protecting her kid’s future, rather than having an organisation share a message about reducing your carbon footprint.

The most effective campaigns connect on shared values, and talk about the people we want to move, not the issues we want to convince them on. It’s not about “wildfire season,”it’s about the “people losing their home.” It’s not about high gas prices, it’s about someone almost losing their job.

To drive support for climate action, we need to counter misconceptions and change the common narrative. Potential Energy’s research found half of respondents think that the increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events is caused by “natural changes” rather than “carbon pollution.” Using the phrase “unnatural disasters” to describe extreme weather events is twice as effective at helping people make the connection to climate change and carbon pollution as using the phrase “extreme weather” alone. It shows people that these are not natural or normal weather patterns that our species can live through without issue. These “unnatural disasters” like floods, fires, and storms are becoming more common. Climate change from fossil fuel pollution is happening now. Let’s call them what they are, #UnnaturalDisasters.

What challenges do you anticipate facing in 2024? How do you plan on meeting those challenges?

We have had two key challenges in 2024.

  • The first is being hugely outspent by our competition. It is estimated that fossil fuel companies spend an aggregate 750 million dollars per year convincing the general public that everything is fine and their pollution blankets are not causing the earth to heat up at an alarming rate. To meet this challenge we have to be highly efficient, get the most lift out of every media dollar. We have to do the research up front to select an audience that is movable and influential, learn what makes them tick, and then spend years with them building our relationship.
  • The second challenge is noise. We are in the business of changing people’s minds about climate. This requires long-term educational campaigns and continually capturing our targets’ attention amidst a firehose of other public and political issues hitting them in every media channel throughout their day. To meet this challenge we rely on triggering emotion, and identity matching our messengers. When our Science Moms talk to moderate suburban women in the Midwest, “mom to mom” – our audience listens.

Tell us a little about your approach to marketing.

Climate change has a marketing problem. People don’t understand it, therefore they don’t care about it as much as they should. And since the people don’t seem to care, climate change gets deprioritized.

It starts by deeply connecting with people — their lives, their hopes, their fears, their aspirations.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says what a great day for some “decarbonization.”

For most people, climate change seems too big, too complicated and too political. To get people to engage with this issue and demand solutions, we use an approach built around human-centered stories that capture their imaginations, make the problem easy to digest and present solutions that are within reach.

Which marketing channels are you using currently? Where are you seeing most success and how has this evolved over time?

Through ruthless evaluation of our impact on people in our target audiences we’ve had to learn a few things. By bringing a brand-based marketing approach to persuasion campaigns, we force ourselves to measure against real-world outcomes. How much did it cost per person to lift our audience up the climate belief and action ladder? Which channels, combination of channels, level of spend per person and creative mix is doing the most work for us, cost efficiently?

The playbook we have developed to deliver the most effective attitude change per dollar per person includes many tactics that will sound familiar to marketers, and we have validated them in our own practice time and again.

  • Time builds trust. The more time our targets spend with us, the higher the persuasion lift per dollar. This may seem obvious, but it has helped us shift spend away from platforms with low video complete rates like Facebook and into high attention, big screen environments like CTV.
  • Rigorous pre-market testing pays off. Every new creative asset goes through random control trials with panels of our target audience, and most importantly we bake in the production time to fix, edit, adjust that asset, test again – until we get something that is winning before we scale up the distribution spend.
  • Multi-channel proves it’s worth every time. 2+2 is truly greater than 4. We re-learn this at least once per year, comparing outcomes and attribution across a variety of media mixes. In one campaign we were able to follow our target through their entire day; nudge on streaming TV during morning news, entertain them in the car on the radio, spark their attention with billboards on the highway, stop their scroll in the social media feed, retarget those viewers when they searched online, programmatically remind them when they shopped online, geofence them when they stop by the mall, nudge them again with message-aligned news articles that we push onto their mobile phones, serve our ads again on the big screen at home, and show up a final time in a podcast as they drift off to sleep.
  • Meet the moment. Research has shown that there is a predisposition to digesting climate messages after moments of impact. One study found that internet searches related to climate change in the US increase in the months following tropical cyclones and there may be a window of opportunity for building public support for climate action. Our ability to meet the moments has evolved with our rapid response strategies.
  • Pulse strategies beat always-on for changing people’s beliefs and perceptions. Heavy, high density pulses separated by dark periods is the most efficient way to keep moving attitudes and building trust over years. This is something we evolved over time and testing. We tried always on for months, we tried pulses with drip spends in between. We monitored ad stock and identified spend per person variables that correlated the most with lift. In the end, 8-10 weeks on and heavy followed by 6-10 weeks off have delivered the goods.

How much or how little are you using A.I. or automation in your marketing efforts?

We use AI for our research, which informs our marketing efforts. This year, we have innovated how we collect and analyze data by deploying new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools (Listen Labs and Rhetorical), allowing us to analyze more data faster and for less money. This includes AI analysis of live 1:1 interviews in video format to inform creative development, AI-led qualitative interviews to understand citizen sentiment on climate and extreme weather events, and crowdsourcing and messaging tournaments to develop new narratives for extreme weather.

Earlier this year, using the data gathered through our AI-facilitated research, we convened a working group of a dozen national organisations doing rapid response around extreme weather events as an opportunity to align efforts around effective data-backed narratives. Through this effort, the narrative we identified – “unnatural disasters” – has been incorporated into our campaigns.

We also have of course been using ChatGPT in strategy sessions and presentation prep since it came out. For our kind of personalised messaging and identity-matched video creative the machine learning tools have not advanced enough, and require expert resources to get the most value out of them. We often cast real people who have suffered from climate change and unnatural disasters in our ads – we need to meet people where they are and that requires a measure of vulnerability and uncertainty in the process.

We are starting to test machine learning approaches to shift media spend in real time towards higher performing cohorts. And when we need to quickly come up with a list of hooks or calls to action, AI tools can be smart, if mostly prescriptive, assistants.

What is something you’ve learned in your career that you would like to share with young SMB marketers entering the industry?

  • Nothing beats being able to “see” your audience in your metrics. That requires outcome-based measures, such as sales, votes, lifts on surveys or changes in behaviour. All the standard media metrics like impressions, video complete rates, click through rates are just tools for the media buyer. They cannot drive strategic decisions. They do not speak to growing a business, or changing the attitudes and behaviours of an audience. Unfortunately in advertising all the tools, contracts, and calculations are based on these untethered metrics of low import. Don’t accept what is readily there – find the key performance indicators that are connected to real world impact for your business.
  • Always be innovating. Every campaign and media budget you deploy should have 10-20% experimental new elements. Take the time to set up measurability and try something new every time. Marketing technology is evolving rapidly and the ways we did it last year can be wrong, outdated and wasteful.  As an example, up until recently Linear TV was still making up about 80% of every public sector marketing budget, years after the audience had moved on from that channel. Efficient plans these days only use Linear TV sparingly.