Using centralized advertising to broadcast a singular campaign message regarding energy transition

To advance the public discourse around energy transition, C4C convened a coalition of civil society organizations. Each group arrived with its own vocabulary, strategic priorities, and institutional capability. As our previous experience has led us to expect, aligning those differences into a shared narrative is time-consuming. Coalition-building, in this case, was not a matter of signing a joint statement but of gradually constructing a working rhythm based on trust, repeated dialogue, and shared goals.

Facilitating this process required more than coordination; it demanded ongoing editorial and strategic meetings and the adoption of the "Ad Council" model, in which messaging and distribution were centralized. In this campaign, we adopted their system by making all the ads by a single campaigner who then distributed them through each coalition member’s account. So instead of each organization producing separate communications, the coalition operates with a single, integrated campaign “kitchen”.

This approach proved effective. The campaign’s messaging circulated more widely through paid ads on selected coalition members’ accounts and resonated beyond the echo chambers. Drawing from benchmarks set during our previous campaign, we projected a target reach of 7.7 million people. With improved coordination and a higher investment in paid ads distribution, the campaign ultimately reached 32,7 million individuals—more than four times the original projection.

To better understand the level of engagement the audience has with the campaign, we introduced a new framework with additional measurements. We did not just count how many people saw the message, but how much they actually “consumed” or inspected it. At the heart of this approach is a breakdown of the audience journey, allowing us to track movement from first exposure to meaningful content consumption.

• The campaign journey starts with “ad reach”, representing the total number of people exposed to the campaign's visual content, measured simply by reach.
• The next stage, “ad consumption”, quantifies how many viewers watched enough of the video to grasp its core message, indicated by 75% video ad completion.
• Following this, “ad engagement” tracks individuals who clicked on the ad, demonstrating interest and intent.
• From there, we monitor “website landing”, which ensures users successfully accessed the campaign website, filtering out incomplete clicks.

The journey concludes with “website consumption”, assessing how many visitors actually read the long-form content, measured by 75% scroll depth to signify full engagement with the narrative.

Importantly, this framework allowed us to distinguish between different levels of message exposure. The short message (a condensed version of the campaign’s narrative) was primarily delivered through video ads, in step two. The complete message, however, was delivered in step five, where engaged users took the time to read through the full website content. This tiered model not only offers greater clarity about who saw what but also provides a roadmap for refining future campaigns, showing precisely where attention is gained and where it drops off.

We can visualize the journey of our campaign with a funnel:

Here, we can see that the most significant drop occurred in the last section, which is message consumption. This is something expected, as reading the website thoroughly takes a lot of effort and concentration. However, at the same time, we can see that there is at least an audience the size of the ICE BSD that willingly learned about energy transition all the way through.

This repeatable framework is a huge step forward in how we look at campaign effectiveness. We think putting it into action will help in both accountability and insight, helping us better understand the impact and reach of our work. By giving us a consistent and strong way to assess things, this framework will help us spot winning strategies, figure out where we can do better, and ultimately make our future campaigns even more successful.