Brief Explanation

Our mission was simple; alert existing customers to the existence of GEM, and convince potential customers to switch to Mercury Energy because of GEM. The product itself is rather complicated to explain concisely, as it has a multitude of features, all which analyse power consumption in some way. From this point of view, the biggest challenged we faced was to communicate this complicated product in a way in which anyone could easily understand.

The Brief

We were tasked to launch GEM, a new online tool that lets Mercury Energy customers see how much power their home is using, and what it’s costing them. GEM makes buying and using power a completely transparent experience, showing users exactly what they’re paying for. To do this, we took New Zealand’s most widely read newspaper, something else people buy without really know what they’re paying for, and gave it the ‘GEM treatment’.

How the final design was conceived

Newspapers are rather ambiguous. You buy one without really knowing what’s inside it beyond the front-page story. It was this media insight that provided us with the perfect canvas to tell the story of GEM. We interrogated The Herald’s editors and extracted every fact possible about their 45472nd edition. Taking art direction cues from the newspaper itself, we displayed these facts as headlines and made them front and back page news. And to keep things interesting, while still staying true to the front and back page, we used the newspaper’s classified section to insert some facts of our own.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

So on Tuesday 9th April, 2013, all 870,000 readers of The Herald received a newspaper that told them exactly what they were paying for, before they even turned the first page. They say you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, but on that day, the facts were the story. Now 50,000 New Zealanders are enjoying the benefits of GEM, which means when they pay their power bill, they know exactly what they’re paying for.