The branding lives in the lighting, not the lower thirds.
The answer was to stop talking about energy entirely.
Power Players is a content series built on the FA partnership, pairing the brand with world-class football minds, starting with England manager Thomas Tuchel. The key decision was how to frame him: not as someone endorsing an energy product, but as someone who builds, renews and channels power in others. Each episode theme mapped to a live product push. 'Staying in Control' ran alongside the January price cap, 'The Power of Consistency' supported the heat pump campaign, and 'Staying Ahead of the Game' launched with the EV tariff. The series never mentioned a product. It made people feel what the brand stood for, and that feeling is what the performance team retargets.
The creative challenge was making something people would choose to watch. Branded content usually ends up looking exactly like branded content, so I pulled references from far outside the category: Nike's Once a Year interviews for raw access, Sneaker Wars for editorial confidence, Diary of a CEO for pacing and intimacy, Mark Cuban's Masterclass for authority without stiffness. None of them were energy brands. That was the point. After several treatments we landed on something unmistakably E.ON Next but more editorial: the kind of thing that doesn't look like it needs the brand's permission to exist.
Every production decision had a reason. Close-ups, slightly off-centre: straight-on felt like a lecture, wider felt distant. Three cameras gave the edit rhythm. The lighting was stripped back to a key light plus coloured rim and back lights: a purple haze across the white England kits in the boot room, a pop of red on Tuchel's face. Both colours nod to the England crest. The branding lives in the lighting, not the lower thirds.
The Copy Director and I storyboarded the full content system: 13 assets per episode, from a 10-minute YouTube interview down to 60-second TikTok quickfires and LinkedIn carousels. Everyone who engaged went into an audience pool that the performance team retargeted with product ads. The content warmed the leads. The ads closed them.
137,000 views across LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. LinkedIn engagement hit 3.87% against a 2% benchmark. Click-through came in at 1.05% against 0.3%, driving 3.5x more high-intent traffic than the platform average. TikTok engagement peaked at 8.72%, with 33,000+ plays on Instagram.
Not a sponsorship. A lead generation machine dressed as a content series.
