The Philadelphia Flyers got a lot of added exposure during the Stanley Cup Finals.
So did Craig White.
White is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Philadelphia Gas Works, which launched a television campaign in March, its first in quite a while. The star of the show: the 54-year-old White.
PGW bought a lot of airtime on Flyers broadcasts. So when the hockey team made the playoffs, White serendipitously got a lot of extra face time, gratis.
Night after night, while the Orange and Black were slugging it out on the ice before big TV audiences, White appeared on screen during commercial breaks, wearing a blue PGW polo shirt, promoting the virtues of natural gas.
"Natural gas is today's energy game-changer," White says in the 30-second spot. "You're wasting money if you're still purchasing oil or steam instead of natural gas from PGW."
PGW is no neophyte to advertising - last year, it devoted $3.4 million of its $929.4 million in revenue to marketing. But the ads are typically print or bus shelter public-service campaigns calling on customers to apply for heating grants, or selling them parts-and-labor plans.
What's new is that the perennially cash-strapped, city-owned utility is trying to aggressively expand its market share - in a television campaign, no less.
"This is our new approach to get our product into the market," said Joseph Smith, PGW marketing vice president.
The Philadelphia Gas Commission, the city agency that reviews PGW's budget, approved the campaign.
"If this helps them capture more market, that's good," said City Councilwoman Marian B. Tasco, commission chairwoman.
The $600,000 campaign - the utility plans to spend a comparable sum during fiscal 2010-11 - is focused on cable customers in premium zip codes. PGW signed a two-year, $300,000 deal with Comcast that is weighted on Flyers games, which attract a high-income viewership.
The campaign targets commercial and industrial customers. PGW is encouraging them to install gas microturbines - miniature power plants that generate electricity and heat simultaneously, easing reliance on the Trigen-Philadelphia steam system and Peco Energy Co.'s electrical grid.
PGW says its distribution system has lots of extra capacity - sales have dropped over the decades as the city's population has shrunk and furnaces and appliances have become more energy-efficient.
Boosting sales allows PGW to spread its fixed costs over the base of 479,000 customers without having to expand the system.
"If we can increase sales, we can keep the rates down for our firm customers," White said. "Our firm customers are primarily our residential and small commercial customers."
This is an opportune time to promote natural gas, PGW says. Gas commodity prices are low and projected to remain competitive for the long term, with huge supplies coming in from new sources such as the Marcellus Shale.
PGW is also playing up the environmental advantages of natural gas over other fossil fuels: It emits less noxious pollutants and greenhouse gases than coal or oil.
So the utility is wooing customers who want to reduce their carbon footprint, but cannot afford solar or wind power.
"If natural gas can't make it now, it'll never make it," White said.
The push is getting positive results, he said - the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City has installed three gas microturbines on its roof, and is adding two more.
"We have to find new opportunities and new markets to keep this company moving forward," White said. "People are talking to us now who wouldn't give us the time of day before."
The company's marketing department pushed to promote an executive as the utility's face. Chief executive officer Thomas E. Knudsen said he nominated White "because he's better looking."
White, a second-generation career PGW employee who moved up on the white-collar side of the business, balked at the starring role.
"I don't have a TV face, and I don't have a radio voice," he said. "I've been here 30 years, and my father was here 40 years before me. One thing you learn, we're low-profile guys here."
But White's accent - he was educated at Kutztown and Drexel Universities - was exactly the type of pretzel-and-mustard flavor that marketing wanted.
"We were looking for the hometown element," said Smith, the marketing chief. "This is a real Philadelphia product, owned by the city, and the face of PGW should be a Philadelphian."
The ads are not slick. They were produced by the same crew that had come to shoot a training video.
"They shot it in half an hour," White said. "It wasn't a major production. We were actually paying for a safety video and were able to squeeze a commercial in there."
White said the TV campaign has had the added benefit of rallying staff morale, which suffered from years of negative publicity. Ratings agencies have given high marks to Knudsen's management team for restoring stability after PGW's previous top-two managers were acquitted on theft charges in 2002 under a cloud of scandal.
"I had a number of employees come up to me and say, " 'Damn it, I feel like we're a real company. I feel like we're stepping out here.' "
Watch the PGW commercial featuring Craig White, executive vice president, at http://go.philly.com/pgw
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