Cleco
Strategy • Stakeholder Engagement • Utilities
The Need
Sometimes the most valuable communications assignment isn't creating a new story. It's helping an organization recognize the larger story it is already living.
When Cleco first brought Fred Surr and the team at Captains of Industry to Louisiana in 2018, the assignment was largely internal. The utility was preparing to acquire NRG South Central Generating, more than doubling its generating capacity, and leadership wanted help bringing the two organizations together.
We began by listening. In-depth interviews with senior management and focus groups with employees at power plants, switching stations, and community operations revealed something larger.
Across Cleco, we found that deep sense of mission common to all utilities: keep the lights on. But Cleco was doing far more than delivering reliable electricity. Its investments in generation, transmission, technology, and infrastructure were helping enable economic development across Louisiana.
Cleco was already doing the interesting work. It just hadn't connected the dots into a larger story.
The Assignment
The opportunity was to move Cleco beyond traditional utility communications that became most visible when the power went out or the company needed something from customers and stakeholders. Instead, the goal became helping Cleco articulate the larger role it was already playing in the state.
Our creative director captured it in three words: Connecting Louisiana’s Future.
What began in internal communications grew into a company-wide platform, appearing in television, radio, print, trucks, press releases, training, community outreach, and communications from Cleco leadership.
Our job was also to make the idea tangible. During our research, we saw a Cleco facility capturing waste heat from a nearby industrial plant and converting it into electricity. Elsewhere, Cleco was building sophisticated transmission infrastructure across some of Louisiana's most difficult terrain.
Those became stories in a series of spots that took viewers “behind the lines.” Each began with the Louisiana people knew, then traveled across the landscape to reveal the generation, transmission, technology, and people working largely unseen behind it. The message wasn't simply that Cleco supplied electricity. It was that all of this infrastructure ultimately connected people to the good life today and a better Louisiana tomorrow.
Fred helped shape the strategy, choose the locations and select the stories and people featured, and developed the visual approach, producing and directing the spots with a Louisiana-based crew. The first spot earned Cleco its first-ever Gold Telly Award. It was Fred’s sixth.
The Result
What began as an internal communications assignment expanded into an agency-of-record relationship, with Captains working closely with CEO Bill Fontenot and Cleco leadership across the organization.
Connecting Louisiana’s Future grew from a campaign line into part of the company's identity. It helped Cleco present itself as both a forward-looking energy company investing in new technology and infrastructure, and a homegrown Louisiana company whose employees saw keeping the lights on as a responsibility to their neighbors.