OCTOPUS ENERGY
Delivering comms for Britain’s best energy company from startup to £3.5BN giant
BRIEF
Our brief from Octopus is wide-ranging. We focus on elevating CEO Greg Jackson’s profile as a leading UK business figure; highlighting Octopus Energy’s world-leading innovation and technology; and showcasing its unrivalled customer service.
We have also responded to the pace of growth of the UK’s fastest-growing private company as it launched a heat pump R&D centre, expanded into India, Spain and Italy and took an investment from Al Gore’s Generation fund that saw the business valued at £3.7billion.
APPROACH
We aimed high. BBC CEO Secrets is a widely-read business feature on the BBC website. Once we’d secured interest from the journalist in interviewing Greg, we considered which topic would be interesting and generate discussion. We settled on the fact that Octopus doesn’t have an HR department… and the results can be seen below.
We focused on the opening of the heat pump R&D centre to land the innovation and technology element of our brief. We invited a number of senior energy and environment journalists for individual tours of the centre in Slough.
Our MD James has helped steer Octopus Energy’s communications over six years as it has transformed from an ambitious startup into a £3.5bn business driving the green energy revolution. We continue to work hand-in-hand - or hand-in-tentacle - with the business. We were inside its HQ advising on media strategy on the day it was preparing to announce a $600million investment from Generation Investment Management, co-founded and chaired by Al Gore.
RESULTS
Octopus’s unstoppable growth combined with some fiercely proactive PR saw more than 1,100 pieces of national media coverage in 2021. But more impressive than the volume was the quality of the coverage, reflecting Octopus’s rise from challenger to business valued in the same ballpark as Centrica.
The BBC CEO Secrets story was read 2million times in 48 hours with an average dwell time of 45 seconds. The story was promoted from the business section of the BBC site to its homepage. It was the second most read story on the BBC that day and was the best performing CEO Secrets of the year.
The Al Gore funding story generated 350 pieces of news coverage, from Bloomberg, The FT and Sky News to TechCrunch, Mail Online and The Times
As 2021 came to a close, Greg was being called on as the voice of the industry during the energy crisis - and was hailed as “the Elon Musk of energy” by Business Insider.
