Getty Images
Paris Saint-Germain against Olympique de Marseille is often an electric affair. But when the two French soccer rivals met in early 2023, the lights went out – or at least the advertising hoardings started glitching.
This didn’t go unnoticed by the millions of people watching the game as it was broadcast live on Amazon Prime Video. Social media was soon awash with posts from users trying to decipher what was going on before some started to figure out that the lights inside the Orange Vélodrome were actually communicating with them in morse code.
The message read, ‘SOS, plug me in’, drawing attention to a previously little-known issue about the levels of energy used to power major sporting events.
The objective
The Stadium SOS campaign was an advertising stunt carried out by Enedis, which was one of 11 brands recognised in the 2024 Laureus Sport for Good Index for using sport to drive positive social and environmental impact. A wholly owned subsidiary of French energy giant EDF, the company is a public service which claims to distribute electricity to 37.5 million customers across France every day.
Created by ad agency Publicis Sport France, the aim of the Stadium SOS campaign was to raise awareness of the fact that many venues used for major sporting, music and cultural events in France are powered by diesel generators, when it would be more sustainable if they were connected to the grid. A professional soccer match broadcast on television, for example, uses 4,000 litres of diesel, generating as much as 12 tonnes of CO2 emissions, or the equivalent of 70 trips from Paris to Marseille by car.
However, Enedis estimates that an event powered by electricity reduces CO2 emissions by 90 per cent compared to one operating on diesel generators.
According to Catherine Lescure, the director of impact and communication at Enedis, the company decided it had to “lead the way” by demonstrating through the Stadium SOS campaign that there is “another way” to power events.
“What we wanted to do was really raise awareness that we can change the way we – as society and people in charge of events who make the decisions – use power,” she says.
The results
Lescure says Enedis chose a game between PSG and Marseille to amplify its message because the company knew that the Ligue 1 fixture would guarantee both a large and younger audience on Prime Video, which Lescure notes generated around 3.5 million viewers for the match.
The company also worked with social media influencers to ensure that the initiative was generating buzz online, while it was no doubt beneficial that the match involved the likes of Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, who scored while the advertising boards were flashing.
All told, the campaign delivered 23,200 interactions, 7.8 million views and more than 120 million impressions, as well as generating €425,000 worth of earned media for Enedis.
Lescure describes Stadium SOS as “the biggest and most transformational campaign” the company has done and says it will also inform Enedis’ advertising strategy moving forward. However, she also wasn’t surprised by the impact it had.
“Not really, actually,” she says. “Because we knew this was something that could attract the public and raise their attention, because it was fun, in a way, with all these lights making an SOS to the world that they wanted to be shown with low-carbon electricity. But it’s always very positive to see the real results.”
The wider impact
While the Stadium SOS campaign generated significant engagement, it also served as a call to action for organisers of events of all shapes and sizes.
Indeed, just over a year after the advertising campaign, Enedis went on to play a crucial role in the delivery of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in its capacity as an official supporter of the event.
Rather than using diesel generators, all temporary and existing venues – including the Stade de France – were connected to the electricity grid, helping to minimise the environmental impact of an event that welcomed more than 10,000 athletes and close to ten million spectators.
Electric terminals placed by Enedis at key sites like the Champ de Mars, Trocadéro and Place de la Concorde will be used for other events in future, while nine kilometres of cable were installed by the company to power the International Broadcast Centre at Le Bourget.
Paris 2024 organisers recently revealed that they hit their sustainability targets, reducing the carbon footprint of last year’s event by more than 54 per cent compared with the average for London 2012 and Rio 2016.
#LeSaviezVous?@Enedis veille sur le réseau⚡️des jeux @Paris2024 sur ts les sites de compétitions. 3000👷 Enedis sont mobilisés dans et aux abords des sites : ils sont les👀 et les🙌 pour opérer sur le réseau au➕près des JOP dès7️⃣h du🌅 jusque tard ds la🌃 après les compétitions pic.twitter.com/RfWlovgazm
— Enedis en Normandie (@enedis_normand) August 5, 2024
The future
The Stadium SOS campaign ran in the same year that Enedis became a ‘entreprise à mission’, or ‘mission-driven company’, making it the first major business from the energy sector to attain that status.
As a result, Lescure says that corporate social responsibility is fully integrated into Enedis’ strategy and notes that the company wants to serve as “a role model” when it comes to environmental and social impact.
The company believes that, by 2050, electricity should represent 55 per cent of energy consumption compared to 25 per cent today, meaning adoption of the public distribution network will be crucial to achieving that goal.
As well as Paris 2024, Enedis also provided its services for the International Festival of Extreme Sports – featuring disciplines like skateboarding, BMX and three-on-three basketball – in Montpellier last May, as well as surfing’s Quiksilver Festival and sailing’s Route du Rhum.
Enedis is therefore optimistic that its work on Paris 2024, alongside advertising campaigns like Stadium SOS, will prove to other organisers that it is possible to power their sporting, musical and cultural events by connecting to the public electricity distribution network.
“The success of this [Stadium SOS] campaign – but more largely, what we’ve done for these last four years – is that we decided to take this issue and make it well known so that we could drive change,” says Lescure.
“The best reward is that the IOC decided that from now on, all Olympic Games will be connected to the grid. So that’s really the best success we can have. It means low-carbon electricity for the next Olympic Games. And if it works for the Games, which is a large event, of course it will work for smaller events like festivals and so on.
“That’s what we’re very proud of. We’re not selling any product. We are a public service. We just have to show we have the power to change things if we want to do it.”
Enedis was one of 11 brands inducted into the Laureus Sport for Good Index in 2024. To find out more about the Index, click here.