By Matt Stewart, Antenna Group Group vice president
Over twenty years in business, Antenna Group has won hundreds of awards. From the World Economic Technology Pioneers to CES Innovation Awards to Platts Energy Awards and beyond, our research, writing and behind-the-scenes follow up has helped bring home almost every award under the sun—for our clients.
Antenna Group itself hasn’t historically won many awards—because we very rarely apply for them for ourselves. That’s starting to change. Over the winter, Antenna Group VP Kim Setliff was named one of the top PR executives under 30. And today, we’re excited to announce a new achievement.
Antenna Group and our client GlassPoint Solar have been named finalists for the 2016 SABRE Awards North America for our initiative Introducing the Next Big Solar Market: The Oil Industry. We’re proud to appear in the energy and natural resources categories alongside industry titans, including Entergy, Phillips 66, Virginia Energy Sense and Vancouver Energy, as well as their respective PR firms. Just 300 campaigns were named finalists from more than 1800 applications.
Antenna Group has worked with GlassPoint for many years introducing and validating the concept of solar enhanced oil recovery while positioning GlassPoint as a leader. This award recognizes our work helping the company announce one of the largest solar projects in history: Miraah. Starting with an exclusive in the WSJ, our strategy not only secured widespread global coverage but also drove home a key business point: the oil industry represents the next big market for solar.
Solar and oil are a naturally interesting combination, precisely because on first blush they don’t seem to go together at all—“strange bedfellows” as a CNBC reporter once noted. This natural friction sets the stage for a fascinating story: solar power can play a pivotal role helping oil production operations reduce costs, save energy and significantly reduce their carbon footprint. Our strategic approach supported with data (Miraah takes 63,000 cars off the road), big name partners (Petroleum Development Oman and Shell) and unprecedented scale (over 1GW of energy!), helped GlassPoint make one of the biggest splashes in energy last year.
GlassPoint has been a terrific partner. Their CEO Rod MacGregor is a highly quotable, thoughtful executive with an irresistible dose of Scottish charm. Executives prioritize making time for in-person meetings with reporters and analysts, which is critical to explaining the technology ahead of time so that news updates later can leapfrog the introductions into the heart of the story. We plan as far ahead as we can with thoughtful strategy recommendations, so when the unstoppable last-second changes start flowing we have a clear gameplan that turns chaos into a strategic storytelling exercise. The payoff continues today, with ongoing visibility as an energy industry leader commenting about big picture topics such as the SunEdison bankruptcy.
As Katie Struble—Ant alum and current GlassPoint marketing director—says: “Antenna Group rocked it! I’ve worked with them firsthand for years to develop thoughtful strategy and messaging that sticks. Their impressive media chops consistently deliver major hits that exceed our high expectations.”
A particular treat for us was helping to name the Miraah project. Miraah means “mirror” in Arabic, and GlassPoint’s enclosed trough technology incorporates many mirrors. Additionally, the Anglicized word “Mira” has many lovely connotations, including meaning “to look” in Spanish, “wonderful” in Latin, “wow” in Italian. (Like we said—a treat!)
We’re proud to be named a finalist with GlassPoint for this prestigious PR industry recognition. Hats off to the rest of the nominees!