Ecotricity Case Analysis

About a million people around the world seemed to enjoy the hilarious yet tragic scenes of cooling towers crumbling. Ecotricity, a British (and the country’s first) green energy company, which was founded in 1996, released a short clip via YouTube on February 7, 2012, attracting over 3.4 million views as of September 2016. Ecotricity’s central goal is to confront and bash the bad behavior of the Big Six power companies in the UK – British Gas, EDF Energy, npower, E. ON UK, Scottish Power, and SSE. The Big Six has been notoriously known for “unethical pricing, awful customer service, and the dire lack of investment in new sources of green energy,” (Ecotricity, ¶8) yet it supplies gas and electricity to a large majority of British homes and businesses.

Observing one major aspect of the campaign video, there is no one orally speaking into the microphone to narrate the collapse of cooling towers with animated faces and arms. Perfectly in sync with the animation and scenes, a classical song by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is played in the foreground where no one is speaking. The compilation of the humor of animation and personification with an emotional opera singer permits the company to convey Ecotricity’s message to its intended British audience, along with other “unintended” viewers around the

10 from Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) by Mozart. Near the beginning of the clip (about 15 seconds into the video), the sensational operatic singing simply provides a humorous effect when two cooling towers begin to break down. For comedic purposes, whenever a new scene of different falling cooling towers begins, the video’s editor synchronized the timings with each individual lines of the cavatina. Analyzing only the tonal features of this particular classical music (not the lyrics of the song), the song’s style is marked larghetto to further supplement the emotional effect of a slow tempo; according to the overall tone, the melody of this song is slow, steady, and sorrowful. Although viewers may still feel the pity for the falling personified towers, which arise from the constant foreground aria and an accompanying orchestra, viewers can still be convinced to foresee the decline of the Big Six with humor, seeing that “It’s time to move on” (Ecotricity, 0:49) away from