Five years from now, Jonathan Beamer wants different rivals.
Two weeks after unveiling a new slate of TV commercials, the chief marketing officer of SolarCity -- the solar panel company chaired by billionaire Elon Musk -- said he hopes future ads won’t be focused on the problems that come of burning fossil fuels.
“My guess is that, in five years, we’ll be much farther along in the process of realizing that coal and oil and gas are dirty and are behind us,” Beamer told The Huffington Post by phone on Monday. Ads for solar panels will then compete with other renewable energy producers instead.
SolarCity rolled out three 30-second animations last month meant to juxtapose the simplicity of generating solar against the complicated and environmentally damaging process behind coal, gas or oil. In one, a narrator speaking at an auctioneer’s pace explains how coal becomes electricity. A prehistoric dragonfly fossilizes into coal, which is then extracted by coughing workers and shipped by a smoke-spewing train. Another set of workers, also hacking up lungs, then burn the coal at a power plant emitting carbon into the air. All the lights in the town turn on. The final five seconds of the ad shows, by contrast, a house equipped with rooftop solar panels. The process there is explained in one second: the sun comes up.
It’s a straightforward, cutesy way of simplifying a dry, complicated issue. That’s how all ads should be to attract more customers.
“If you can make ads that are the level of fit and finish of a bank ad or an insurance ad, it makes us seem like we’re stable and trustworthy, and that our time is now,” said Beamer, who came to SolarCity over a year ago from the insurance giant Progressive. “That’s opposed to where we came from, which is grass-roots, startup campaigns where we were screaming at people.”
Solar energy made tremendous strides last year. There are now more solar jobs in the United States than oil extraction jobs -- though the oil jobs still pay better. The historic accord reached at December’s climate talks in Paris created a framework in which solar will play an increasingly bigger role in powering the planet. Solar installations may provide 3.5 percent of U.S. power by 2020, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association.
“A lot of what we do today is just teaching consumers that they have any choice at all,” Beamer said. “The utilities are monopolies.”