Origin compares energy production to making bread or milk
Energy company Origin is encouraging people to think differently about energy in a new campaign which aims to position making energy similar to producing other daily staples.
Created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, the commercial features a man heading into work at Origin in the early hours of the morning where he is seen packaging lit light bulbs while narration compares the production of energy to making bread or milk. It ends with the tagline, “energy made fresh daily”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9iDrhGj6bg&feature=youtu.be
Origin general manager brand and digital Sophie Finn said: “While energy is an essential service, people don’t tend to think about it beyond their bill or switching the lights on.We want people to think about energy in a fresh new way. It takes years of planning and the hard work of thousands of Australians to get energy to people’s homes . An important part of our campaign is showcasing the integral role Origin plays.
Perhaps another TV advert could be made showing the process of producing energy such as digging coal out of the ground, all the transportation involved to deliver fuel and commodities to make mining possible and deliver the coal to the power stations, the burning of the coal and how bad it is for the environment and then showing the unbelievable loss over the electrical distribution network at only delivers 30% or so of the electricity produced at the power station.
This then would educate the average person to understand what is actually happening when you turn on your lights, leave your air-conditioning running unnecessarily or perhaps investing in reducing your energy usage (and or renewable energy).
A little different to comparing manufacturing electricity to baking bread…
Those light bulbs should be gold plated.
Buying bread and milk doesn’t cripple households and cause a debt burden. Bread is not cheap, but it hasn’t doubled in price in the last four years. The boxing of ready lighted bulbs is about as truthful as the notion of energy being more expensive to produce than it was 20 years ago, or its being a scarce and precious commodity.
Sell us this day our daily energy, clip the leaves from the money tree and enslave the people in the new opiate.
I was driving the kids home today and heard the Origin ad on the radio with the slogan “Energy Made Fresh Daily”.
My son who is in Year 10 remarked quoting Albert Einstein that under the law of conservation of energy “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” So technically speaking it is incorrect to imply in the ad that energy is being “Made”.
Personally I think that it is a bit embrassing that Origin with all its technical and engineering capability is claiming to be capable of breaking a fundamental law of physics by claiming to be able to make energy.
In reality Origin is taking energy stored in a chemical form and converting it to eletrical energy – with the thermal waste heat lost during the generation process and transmission losses involved more that 2/3rds of the original chemical energy is lost before it is used in the home.
I appreciate the need to simplify complex messages for mass audiences, however, when the simplification process results in a message that is potentially misleading and can be spotted by a 15 year old, there needs to be more detail in the back story to explain what is going on to those in the community who wish to have a higher level of apprecation and understanding of the important technological processes that drive our economy.
When I had a look at the Origin web link to the campaign the story this there but you had to follow a number of links to find it.
From my viewpoint and those of my children I would like to see a better overview up front of the technological processes behind the scenes, rather than dumbed down and potentially misleading concepts and imagary that relates more to Coles and Woolies fresh produce (chickens do make eggs, cows do make milk – but humans cannot make energy) than the process of electrical generation.