Centrica’s British Gas has a new agency you may not have heard of and its first act has been to sideline long-serving brand mascot Wilbur the Penguin.
The agency is called Nucleus and it comprises a range of WPP companies: The&Partnership (BG’s long-serving creative agency in which WPP owns a minority), MediaCom, WundermanThompson and PR firm BCW. Nucleus re-pitched against Publicis Groupe last year.
Its debut campaign ‘Here to Solve’ is aimed at persuading people to re-appraise the brand (which has suffered a number of PR disasters in recent years) as more than an energy supplier. So the campaign plugs its HomeCare services, solving a mini-bathroom crisis.
BG marketing director Jill Dougan says: “Here to solve is not just a brand message for the campaign, it is a mindset and it is a promise that we want to live by and deliver on for all of our customers. We are already starting to apply this to our broader business approach and as a company we need to think about how we can solve our customers problems rather than what can we sell them.
“When developing the new campaign, we wanted to ensure that as a company, we put customers at the heart of everything we do, so seeing the world thorough their eyes made total sense creatively.”
It’s a lively effort, nicely shot by Simon Rattigan of HLA, and quite brave in showing that things do go awry sometimes in the bathroom.
But can British Gas walk the walk?
MAA creative scale: 8.
A load of rubbish, they’ve just switched the engineers bonus scheme to sales based, laughable.
Made redundant as they transferred their Hive technical support operation to Romania. Here to Solve……