About this episode
How do you tell the story of the energy transition to audiences tired of the same old messages? On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Mel Adamson. Mel is the founder of climate-tech marketing firm Alder & Co. Mel and I discuss the evolving role of climate change in energy marketing, the importance of brand values, and where marketing fits in the climate-tech sector more broadly. Mel emphasizes that people in the climate workforce need to make and seize their own opportunities and explains why she foresees growing demand for soft skills in this space. She also highlights the importance of creativity in climate marketing, advocating for a shift away from traditional “green” messaging toward something more like…humor?
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael (00:01)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael (00:24)
How do you tell the story of the energy transition to audiences tired of the same old same old? On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Mel Adamson. Mel is founder of climate tech marketing firm Alder & Co. Mel and I discuss the evolving role of climate change in energy marketing, the importance of brand values, and where marketing fits in the climate-tech sector more broadly. Mel emphasizes that people in the climate workforce need to make and seize their own opportunities and explains why she foresees growing demand for soft skills in this space. She also highlights the importance of creativity in climate marketing, advocating for a shift away from traditional green messaging towards something more like humor perhaps?
Michael (01:09)
Mel Adamson, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s so great to have you here.
Mel (01:14)
Thank you for having me. I’m super excited about it.
Michael (01:18)
So the way I always like to start with my guests is to basically ask you to kind of sketch out your life and career to this point and sort of the decisions that you’ve made that brought you to your current role.
Mel (01:31)
Yeah, happy to talk about it. I actually started my career out as a journalist, went to journalism school. And the idea was I was going to work for the AP. This was my plan back when I was like 19. I was going to work for the AP and then go and work for the Chicago Tribune and somehow make my way to Detroit because I wanted to work for Automobile Magazine.
I love cars and that was going to be my dream job. That didn’t exactly happen for many reasons, mainly because I fell in love with a guy and ended up marrying him. But I love tech for the same reasons I love cars. I love understanding how things are put together. And so right out of school, I was a tech journalist working for many different publications, I went in-house—not in-house, but I worked for a paper. I’m from Dallas and moved to Austin and worked for the Round Rock Leader as a writer and editor. Then, you know, I at some point decided that I didn’t really love, this was the 90s, the late 90s, and didn’t exactly love where some of the advertising and editorial were kind of blurring in my mind, so a total idealist, I guess. And so I decided to move into PR and marketing. And I was working in tech. At this point, I also moved to Portland with my husband. This was in the year 2000. And working in tech PR, I really wanted something bigger.
You know, PR is great. I love the storytelling. It was a natural fit for me, but I kind of wanted bigger, like, control of the message and the brand. I Started working for marketing agencies that gave me access to planning and strategy. And then after my daughter was born, I thought, you know, and this was 2004, I thought I really want to do marketing for good. I love tech, but, you know, what can I do? And, you know, I think my parents instilled in me that old adage, you know, leave no trace. And I thought, OK, what what can I do? And I’m really lucky. I get to live in Portland, Oregon, and, you know, we are very sustainably-minded place. And unbeknownst to me, that I don’t know if a lot of people know, but Portland is actually a hub for energy. We call ourselves an energy town. We’ve got energy efficiency, lots of headquarters here. We’ve got energy storage. We’ve got renewables. We’ve got a lot of energy companies here. And so I went really deep into energy after working with some sustainability clients and loved it.
And I was working in commercial marketing, HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, all these different measures. And that was kind of the start of it. I worked with lots of utilities. then after working at energy efficiency consulting firms and some branding firms as sort of the energy lead, then I started Alder. And it’s—it’s taken a while for the industry, and this was 2014, it’s taken a while for the energy climate space. It wasn’t what it is today back then, you know? And the education around marketing for energy, you know, was not where it is today. And so it was…I always had energy clients because a lot of my work was through referrals, but we also had other clients too, like Nike was a client and other major brands. But it wasn’t until 2017, one of my clients was doing all kinds of great stuff. It was Transactive Energy, they started the Brooklyn Microgrid and they asked me to come in as their VP of Marketing and I did. So I put Alder on hold for a bit and brought all my team to LO3 and we worked there. It was amazing. It was a super fun experience working at a startup during a really big time because they were in blockchain and they were in IoT and it was just so fantastic and fun. I still reminisce to this day about, I just have learned so much from that experience. But that’s really where I would say 2017, 2018, where I feel like we started to see a lot of the climate and tech companies kind of come together, clean tech, climate tech. And then from there on, after leaving LO3, I really just doubled down on climate and tech.
Michael (07:16)
And you described kind of being interested in pursuing marketing for good. I’m kind of interested to sort of unpack that a little bit more. I mean, you said, you you had your first child and you thought about how you can leave the world better than you found it. Why did energy sort of draw you and your sort of altruistic bone? Like how did it come out through the energy space specifically?
Mel (07:42)
I think I had just been just real curious about it to start. The types of things that we were doing in energy efficiency, it was just really fun. it was unlike anything that I done before. And there was so much to learn. And that’s something—I am a super curious person. And again, you know, mechanical engineers, from computer engineers to mechanical engineers, you know, where it’s just been so fun to understand their work and the things that they’re creating. And that was just really appealing to me.
Michael (08:29)
Did you study any kind of technical subject formally or was this all kind of just something that you absorbed through osmosis as you were going along your career?
Mel (08:39)
In college, actually, I started college as a biology major because I love science so much. It was, you know, I didn’t have a lot of direction. Honestly, I’m the first woman in my family to graduate from college. And I also have a master’s and, you know, I have other cousins who followed in my footsteps, even have PhDs. But yeah, like I didn’t have a lot of direction on what I wanted to do. All I knew is that I love science. I love chemistry. I love physics. I love the engineering of things. So the more that I could get into that and really understand how things work and how they’re particular, to me that was just super exciting. But what do you like back then with no guidance, what do you do with a biology degree? You become a doctor? That’s not really me.
I mean, it’s great for some, and I think it’s a calling for most people, but it just was not for me.
Michael (09:47)
Right, right, you went sort of more in the kind of softer skills direction with your kind of marketing and PR approach. Now, obviously the energy sector has undergone huge, huge shifts over the last couple of decades, essentially since you’ve started working in them. And there’s been a number of influences kind of on the energy sector. And of course, you know, from my perspective, one of the biggest has to be sort of climate change and sort of concerns around that.
Mel (09:53)
Yeah.
Michael (10:16)
How has the climate concern been layered into the work you do and the broader energy space? When you were starting, things were probably very different than the way it is now, right?
Mel (10:30)
Yeah, yeah. It was like back in the day, I mean, like, you know, even 2009, you know, trying to help people understand that climate change is actually a thing, right? So there just wasn’t a lot of people who were on board with that. However, I would say, you know, the message, especially with efficiency is—you know, it wasn’t about climate change. The message, the primary message is really about savings, right? And so that’s what changes behavior or changed behavior back then. And I think now people are starting to see the value of efficiency and the value of products that are more sustainable because it can be both, right? It can be good for you financially, but then it can also be really great for the environment too and for future generations, which is the most important part here.
Michael (11:37)
How much do you see that sort of energy companies in particular are interested in talking about climate change though? And how have you seen that shift? Because it’s not always appealing to every potential audience that they may want to reach, right?
Mel (11:53)
Yeah, it’s, that’s true. And I think what’s changed is that when people started to sort of glom onto the idea that or just really believe in the idea that climate change is a thing, it created a demand. It created, you know, a voice for people and I think people are starting to demand that from their products. People are making buying decisions based on whether things are sustainable. And for the longest time, I don’t think companies really listened or understood that. Definitely, utilities have had a hard time, I think, understanding what their rate payers, their customers are really thinking about. And they want that. And they have the choice now. They have the choice to generate their own solar. They have the choice to join a community solar program. They have the choice to buy EVs. And now energy companies need to pay attention. And I think where there was a turning point during COVID. For me, I felt like COVID was sort of a spur that companies, in a time of crisis—I think it’s really interesting to see how companies show up. And I was kind of trying to take an objective view of all the things that were happening during COVID and looking at the companies and seeing how they’re reacting. Because at the end of the day, the companies that I wanted to purchase from were the ones that were treating their employees, treating their customers in the right way. And it became really evident where their brand stood. And I was counseling clients and helping them to say, okay, during this downtime, maybe you need to take a look at your brand. And what is your purpose now and how are you communicating that to your audiences? And it’s the same thing I tell clients every day. It’s like at some point in time, you know, the shit’s gonna hit the fan and you need to have a brand that you can stand on and know what to do. Because if you have your values laid out, the decision is already made. You know what to do and how to act.
Michael (14:43)
I think that’s a great way to think about it—is that you have to be able to kind of anticipate that things aren’t always going to be rosy and you know when the going gets tough you have to have some kind of bedrock foundation there in order to fall back on. Is that kind of sort of a good way to contextualize it?
Mel (15:01)
Yeah, if your values are transparency or your values are innovation or your values are loving or daring or whatever it is, I mean, you know how to act because those are the ground rules that sort of speak to how you communicate out.
Michael (15:30)
So speaking of brand values, Alder has sort of a warm and sort of inviting kind of brand identity that you’ve tried to create. Can you talk about sort of from the founding of Alder, sort of what was the value identity message that you were trying to get across with Alder and also maybe how it’s changed over the last several years, given all the broader changes in the industry.
Mel (15:57)
Yeah, no, I think, you know, our values really come from within, you know, our leadership team at the time. In 2021, I worked with Bettina Grab. She was my coach. She was my partner.
She’s now moved on to other things, but at the time when we were coming up with the values, we really looked inside and said, what’s the kind of culture that we want to cultivate at Alder? And it was really important to me, and it always has been from day one with Alder, that we create a community where people are safe and they feel loved and respected.
Because I’ve seen in some places where even contractors or employees aren’t treated in the way that I feel like they should. And so it was really important to me to create a culture where people felt safe and loved and where they could be daring and they could say whatever it is that was on their mind, because that is where we’re going to create the best work for our clients. And for a long time, you would go to a conference and everyone had a leaf and it was green and it was on their business card. And we didn’t want that. Our goal is to make sure that—maybe this is a little off topic—but it’s to ensure that climate technologies become universal.
And we’re not going to do that by competing with each other. We’re going to do that by competing with everyone, every brand. And so we need to be distinct, or our clients need to be distinct, and they need to have a clear purpose. So that’s part of our goal. So that was that, just curious and driven. That’s just, again, a little more deep inside of who we are.
Michael (18:18)
So that sort of climate message that you sort of mentioned where everything was kind of a green leaf or something like that, when you were conceptualizing Alder, how much was kind of the climate message something that you wanted to prioritize? Like how much did you think that that would be a sort of a part of your deep-seated values, but also kind of like a draw for your potential clients?
Mel (18:25)
Well, mean, it was, it is and continues to be 100% part of our goal. And I think people want to work with us because we’re not going to give them something that’s already been done. We’re going to ensure that they are competing on a global scale if they need to be, that they are having a differentiated brand that stands out.
Yeah, it is super important. But also at the time, it’s a little scary because sometimes it’s hard to convince people that this is the thing to have. And maybe they’re not the right fit for us. It’s starting a business or trying to build a business. We just won’t appeal to everyone. It’s really important to us that we position companies and create a daring approach for how they’re going to enter into the marketplace. We need that right now.
Michael (19:53)
So how do you kind of know then if your values are aligned with the clients that you work with, especially from a climate perspective, which sort of as we discussed is not kind of a universally accepted message in the energy world, right?
Mel (20:08)
Yeah, it’s, you know, we ask a lot of questions. You know, we talk with founders, we talk with leadership teams. And then I have an advisory board. And sometimes if I don’t understand the tech, or it just seems like, can that really be true? I reach out to my board and say, hey, can you help me out? What do you see here? And a lot of them are technical. And they’ll tell me straight out or give me some feedback. So yeah, so there’s a lot that goes into bringing on a client. We don’t accept all clients, but we—we hope that people come to us because we’re bold in our approach and we will do anything, not everything, but we will do the best that we can to make sure that their brand is solid.
Michael (21:22)
And kind of as a, you know, someone who crafts messages and works on sort of, you know, outreach campaigns, how do you sort of see where the line should be drawn between kind of like evangelizing around a topic like climate, right? Which can be very polarizing versus kind of, you know, a straight sale or something a little more subtle. I mean, where do, how do you sort of, what kind of factors do you take into account when you’re trying to, you know, help clients with their communication around this topic?
Mel (21:51)
Yeah, I think this is where the journalist in me really comes in because I’m not really into fluffy stuff. And I’m also very careful of greenwashing. During grad school, you know, I became a mini-expert in greenwashing and did my capstone project on that. I, you know, we would never bend the truth on those kinds of things. I think, you know, climate, there’s ways of telling a story without having to over-promise. And you don’t want to get yourself in trouble and create, extend a promise that you can’t deliver.
Michael (22:45)
Are there specific trigger points around greenwashing that you see in the broader ecosystem that you are just like, if only I were advising them, this is what I would tell them to do differently?
Mel (23:04)
You know, I think we’re still in a pretty nascent industry and there’s still a lot of a lot to be done in terms of measurement. There’s still a lot to be done around the effectiveness of our technologies. And I just heard, I wish I can remember her name, but I just heard someone talking at a conference and these things are not always linear. They are very much tangential or 3D or whatever you want to call it. We’ll get there, but we’re going to be learning over time and there may be some mistakes that we’re making early on. We just don’t know yet, right?
And I think that’s okay. We’re evolving and we just need to keep learning and staying on top of things, not dismissing new types of measurement. I mean, carbon is a big one, But everyone, we just need to be careful and keep adopting these new advancements as they come on.
Michael (24:27)
So I kind of wanted to again go sort of back to the founding a bit of Alder and just kind of, I’m curious to dig in a little bit more about what were some of the biggest priorities and challenges that you sort of needed to line up and things that you needed to overcome. I’m interested in sort of how you got your advisory board together, for example. I mean, like what brought you to convene sort of technical people to answer those kinds of questions and sort of how did the actual sort of coming together of Alder take place.
Mel (25:01)
Yeah, you know, I think just from the get-go, I don’t think that I can do it all. And I am incredibly collaborative. I like being collaborative. And I just know that I need to lean on certain people to help answer questions that I have. I am really good at uncovering the secret sauce of our purpose for clients. And I’m really great at strategy and writing and execution, but there’s a lot of things I’m not good at. And so bringing on an advisory board and my team in general, you know, people from all kinds of different places and strengths. Diversity is really important to me. I’m a Hispanic woman, grew up in Texas, and I want to create diversity on our teams. It’s really important to me, and as well as the advisory team, to create diversity. So that is also sort of a driving force behind building Alder was ensuring that we have diverse team, diverse advisory board, even diverse clients, you know, those things are really important to me. That’s who I want to support. And if this is my company, I get to drive a lot of those decisions. So that’s that.
Michael (26:47)
So you mentioned previously about how climate tech, kind of broadly defined, is a very nascent space. And there’s sort of still a lot of kind of trial and error and learning, kind of, as you’re as you’re going as a marketer, how do you feel like marketing is received in general in climate tech, especially maybe, you know, in comparison to industries which are much more sort of marketing heavy, like consumer goods or something. I mean, like, where do you feel like, how do you feel like marketing is prioritized kind of in the sector in general?
Mel (27:24)
I think it’s, I don’t think that it’s been prioritized in the past, but I think that’s changing. And, you know, I feel like in the past, you know, I was banging my head against the wall most of the time trying to get people to understand. And it continues to be an education. And, you know, usually when there’s not a lot of budget, marketing is still sort of the first to go. But marketing is really important. And I think for every stage of the business and, you know, and that’s also differentiation, right? And climate—you know, it takes a long time for things to get going, R&D and, you know, pilot stages and, you know, it’s much different than just straight-up tech. So because of that, you know, you still need marketing along the way. So especially at the very beginning, sort of setting those foundational and, you know, and a lot of it is just education and people need to understand the importance of it and having a strong brand. And I think you can tell when a company, you know, sometimes I’ll go to like startup demos and, you know, I’ll look around the room and the companies that have put some effort into their branding, and I don’t mean just logos, I mean their purpose, their messaging and stuff, they stand out. They know how to talk. They know how to tell their story. And I think those are the people who are going to rise to the top. Those are the companies that are gonna rise to the top.
Michael (29:19)
A lot of marketing has become very technologically enabled in recent years. There’s a lot in data analytics and machine learning and marketing analytics and just all different kinds of ways to sort of slice and dice and attempt to grow your audience and lead to conversions and whatnot. What do you think of that trend broadly versus kind of the more, I don’t know, human gut-level aspects of marketing?
Mel (29:26)
Mm. I don’t think it’s that black and white. I think it’s a mix of all the things. If you’re looking at your analytics, you definitely need a person to go in and decide what’s your next best strategy. Those are tools, and a human needs to come in and make some decisions about how you move forward. I think they’re in—they’re really super helpful. I mean, we use all these different tools too for tracking and aggregating data and for display. So I think they’re super helpful, especially for our more science-based founders, they’re super excited about it too.
Everything that Alder does is based on research. And so a lot of it is qualitative, but we have quantitative data too that we use. They love to hear about the analysis that we put together because it’s very similar to the work that they’re doing, right? It’s just in a slightly different way. So yeah, I think those tools are important. If you use them in the right way, we have some—definitely have some ethical boundaries. Some of it can get kind of scary or creepy. But yeah, I think having a mix of that and what you know to be true is important.
Michael (31:32)
And by research, you mean like focus groups, market research, that kind of thing. How does that, it’s interesting because I’m curious about how that sort of differs in climate-tech maybe versus other spaces, especially maybe more consumer-facing spaces.
Mel (31:37)
Mm-hmm.
Well, so like when we go in to work with a client and you know, we want to help them understand their brand or develop a brand. You know, we talk with their, you know, most important stakeholders, their investors, their customers, their employees, right? Employees are number one. We ask them questions about the brand, you know, what is it? What is it like to work here? What is it, you know?
All the good, the bad, you know, it’s, you know, we’re trying to understand the brand. Because for me, the brand is, it’s not what it looks like. It’s not a logo, but it’s that feeling that you have when you hear the name, right? And so that’s what we’re trying to influence. And so we ask all of these questions and then we create an analysis and then, you know, show founders what people think of your brand.
And then, you know, it becomes the basis for the values and the culture. It’s the type of people that you end up hiring. You know, it’s everything. And I think that’s why I’m such a huge believer in brand, because I really do think it can change the world.
Michael (33:08)
Do you work on like crisis communication specifically or sort of crisis management from a marketing perspective? Because that’s sort of something where you’d probably have to come in and really negotiate between these different stakeholders, right? Like some who may say you need to go in one direction and others may say, no, we need to stick to our guns or do another kind of pivot.
Mel (33:30)
I have seen, I have been in situations where a company needs to pivot their values, but the CEO does not want to because the CEO doesn’t have those values. And it’s tricky. Yeah.
Michael (33:51)
What do you do? Do you need to bring in psychologists or…how does that play out?
Mel (33:56)
It’s definitely worth a lot of conversations, but when you have the data to support your strategy, it’s kind of hard to ignore. And, you know, I’ve seen different coaches come in, executive coaches, sometimes talking to wives, you know, I mean…
Michael (34:27)
Or husbands maybe, right?
Mel (34:28)
Or husbands, yes, or husbands. Right. It’s yeah. And and it could be to that if it’s a young company, investors also stepping in. You know, if, if that’s a crisis, that’s not—that I have not seen very often.
Michael (34:48)
But sort of bringing it back to kind of having enough evidence to sort of point to the fact that what you’re proposing is likely the best scenario, kind of the best path forward, right? Bringing it back to the data.
Mel (34:59)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it’s all evidence-based strategies. It’s like this is, I mean, this is what it’s going to take to grow your business. This is what your customers want.
Michael (35:05)
Right, right, right. So I wanna talk for a couple of minutes about sort of the climate workforce, kind of broadly defined, because we are in partnership with Terra.do, and Terra’s mission is to seed 50 million climate jobs over the next decade. It’s a massively ambitious undertaking, of course. Having worked with so many climate-tech companies, how are you, just in general sense, seeing the climate workforce shaping up? And I guess one way to frame it is also, where do you see the biggest gaps now in the climate-tech space?
Mel (35:53)
Gaps. I see, well, I think, you know, people are coming from a bunch of different places. You know, I think, actually think again, COVID, that timeframe really changed a lot of people’s minds. And at least I feel like I heard a lot of those stories. It’s like, you know, when we were home, we kind of figured out that—I really want to focus on sustainability or social impact or, you know, those things are really important to people now. So, you know, they want to be a part of it. And I think that’s great because we need everyone that we can to be working in climate. But I think in addition to having people work in climate, we also need people who are climate-minded to be leaders within their own organizations.
And as I meet a lot of people, I probably have at least one or two conversations a week, people looking to get into climate. And I just, love hearing the passion and the dedication. A lot of people are going back to school, which I think is amazing. And they’re looking for experience. You know, I think—I just think it’s fantastic. But there are also a little, some people can’t find jobs and maybe that’s just the market situation. But there’s so much more that there’s so much you can do at home, right? There’s so much you can do in your own organization to make it a climate job because again, back to that, mission, making climate tech universal, that means it has to happen everywhere, and you can be a leader within your organization. And also, there are a lot of companies that are climate-minded, that would be a great place to be a climate leader within.
Michael (38:09)
Yeah. I I hear regularly from people who are kind of in the job market, you know, maybe they have like a sort of technology background, but more kind of in the sort of digital side, which obviously is very common here in the Bay Area. That was a huge growth area for, you know, the last two decades or so. But they’ve kind of, they feel a little bit discouraged because they don’t feel like there’s sort of much for them sort of in the climate-tech world.
What do you think about that dichotomy between the digital side of the work versus what’s needed in climate tech, which is often much harder technology, right?
Mel (38:53)
Yeah, the hardware side of things. I think that people can make the opportunity for themselves. For example, when I was working at an energy consulting firm early on in my career, you know, it was difficult for me to get anyone to do social media. And this was, you know, 2010, so social media wasn’t what it is today. And they didn’t want to do social, but I wanted to do social. Like, I thought I need to do social as part of my own growth. So I went to a nonprofit and volunteered to do their social media so I could grow my skills.
And while at the same time, I was benefiting this other organization. And so while it may not be on the job stuff, I was still doing something that, you know, was, felt good to me and I was learning a skill. So I think, you know, we need to be creative. It’s not going to be, it may not look like the job that you’re going to every day, but maybe it’s the after-work job that you’re doing at night or it’s the…you know, you’re volunteering on Saturday mornings. You know, that’s really important. And I think there’s still a lot of need for that.
Michael (40:25)
And sort of similar to that, kind of the, sort of, the pool of soft-skilled workers, kind of, you like you and me say, right, who aren’t, you know, super technologically minded, who don’t necessarily have engineering backgrounds. How do you think that, like, what kind of opportunities do you see for those kinds of people in climate tech, especially given that marketing, say, is not always, you know, top priority for a lot of founders and a lot of companies?
Mel (40:58)
So the question is, where does someone like us go and get experience with companies that are more science-based?
Michael (41:04)
Yeah, get experience and also, I mean, do you see that there’s, kind of, a growth opportunity for employment in climate tech, kind of, with the, sort of, soft skills, the marketing side?
Mel (41:18)
Sure, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, whether it’s an internship for people coming right out of college or if it’s, you know, trying to learn a new skill within marketing. Yeah, I mean, I think there are organizations out there. I think that the market is kind of tricky right now. Right. We’ll see how things change.
So yeah, but that’s what I’m saying. If there’s not enough or if you’re not seeing what you need, try to get a little creative and see what you can create on your own.
Michael (42:02)
And then you obviously work with a lot of creatives, right? A lot of creative people, a lot of designers, writers and whatnot. But sort of as we were discussing before, kind of, the messaging around climate can be a little monotonous, right? A little monochromatic. What would you, like what, kind of, advice do you, would you give to people that are trying to, sort of, craft climate creative assets without just doing green leaves and trees?
Mel (42:07)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I would say one of my big things, and I don’t right now have a client that we can do this with, but I really want to do something fun, like funny. You know, I think we need to look at other industries that are, you know, kind of like ours, like energy is kind of like insurance, right? You need to have it.
Right? You need to have, and think of all the Progressive ads or, you know, they’re just so funny. It’s like, why can’t we be funny? I think, you know, we need to really think outside of just the normal, ugh, you know, how can we use what’s already been done in other industries to promote what we’re doing?
I think there’s some really great stuff happening out there. Just thinking about like climate-tech cocktails, like they have great branding and it’s fun. You know, I think we need to be having more fun. I think we’re doing really hard work and sometimes it can get a little depressing. But, you know, so I think we need to—I think we need to change it up every now and then and have some fun and be a little humorous.
Michael (43:55)
So maybe a climate-tech stand up act or something. Get a founder to write a couple of jokes and deliver it, right? At their next investor meeting or, you know, just as like a LinkedIn special maybe or something like that, right?
Mel (43:58)
Ooo. Yes. Yeah, I mean, how fun would that be to see, you know, are we at that point where we can make fun of ourselves a little bit? I don’t know.
Michael (44:24)
You can always make fun of yourself. I feel like that is, I agree, it’s totally an underrated aspect of, especially kind of corporate brand identity a lot of the time. Have you worked on kind of humorous campaigns before?
Mel (44:40)
Yes, I’ve proposed them for utilities and they’re not risky—they’re not a risk group. They will take a more safer approach. And, you know, that’s, I get it. But, you know, it’s fun. It’s fun for our writers. It’s fun for our team to think that way and do something different. And, you know, I hope that there are people who want to take that risk—and I don’t even think it’s a risk—but I think it could be really fun.
Michael (45:16)
Have you actually executed any humorous campaigns in the past, at all throughout your career?
Mel (45:28)
I’m trying to think way back. Yes, mean edgy. I would say more edgy than humorous. Yeah. We’ve definitely proposed a ton of funny things.
Michael (45:39)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Any examples?
Mel (45:48)
Yes. So one example was to a local utility where the problem was knowing your home. So that was the name of our campaign—Know Your Home—because there was sometimes, you know, we would, they would propose different sorts of, you know, heat pumps. But is there—do you have the right things inside of your home to be able to have the type of heat pump. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I have these things. So the campaign was all around know your home. And we had, there was a picture of this guy and it was like, you know, kind of a hipster dude. And he was holding a duck and it was, what was the tag? What was the headline, it was—ducked or duckless, know your home.
Michael (46:48)
I love that. That’s something that only energy geeks might appreciate, if you spend five minutes just figuring that out, that’s fabulous. That’s wonderful.
Mel (47:01)
Yes, yeah, we had a lot of fun with that one. And then it’s because it’s local, you know, we had all these ideas about like when Oregon plays, you know, OSU and, you know, it was like, how can we get hyper-local about the ads and the messaging and yeah, so.
Michael (47:23)
Yeah, I’m sure there are plenty of kind of marketing consumer psychologists who would say that humor and sort of levity are vastly underrated when it comes to catching audiences’ attention and whatnot. So just kind of a couple of wrap-up questions. Sort of looking back at your career especially and, kind of, working at Alder for I guess 10 years now, is that right? Yeah.
Mel (47:51)
Yeah, on and off 10 years.
Michael (47:52)
Congratulations. What would you say your kind of contribution has been, especially, you know, to the climate battle, but also maybe to the values and kind of the aims that you sort of were, you know, cultivating kind of at the beginning when you wanted to work on marketing for good.
Mel (48:12)
I hope that, you know, we’ve set a standard for, you know, how to approach branding and scaling climate-tech companies. And, you know, that they don’t have to be, they don’t have to have a leaf on it, it doesn’t have to be green. The copy can be intense or bold or, you know, daring.
At the end of the day, I will be super happy if that is what we leave this industry with. And that our culture, that the people who worked at Alder are happy and satisfied with their work. It’s really important to me that we create a culture that is inclusive and people really do love working with us. So that’s really important.
Michael (49:17)
And I guess from a broader perspective, as we see the energy space writ large, making this swing toward a more sustainable future, are you feeling optimistic about it? It feels like we’re in a state of two steps forward, one step back a lot of the time. How do you see the bigger picture in energy now?
Mel (49:47)
I’m really hopeful and very optimistic. And I think we’ve, over the last 10 years, I think we’ve seen a major turn for sure. And the more people that we can get involved, and I mean everyone, this includes all of us.
And we need to be inclusive here. That’s really important. Justice is really, like equity and justice are really important to me. And I think, you know, we need to be, ensure that all of our communities have access to clean air, you know, water, everything. So, and yeah, and I’m really hopeful. And I think maybe it’s not going to be our generation, but it’s going to be my daughter’s generation that makes this happen. And I think they will. So yeah, I’m super hopeful.
Michael (50:59)
Yeah, oftentimes it’s a battle of inches, not miles, right? But we just kind of have to keep it up, you know, even if the going gets tough, as we were saying. Yeah, great. Great, well I think we can end it there. Mel Adamson, thank you so much. This was wonderful.
Mel (51:03)
Michael, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Michael (51:24)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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