Malaysia was given the honour to host the prestigious World Gas Conference (WGC) in 2012. PETRONAS lead the way to organising the event that is considered to be the Olympics of the gas industry. In recent years, the energy industry has been hit by a ‘brain-drain’ with many young talents choosing alternate career paths which they believe to be more lucrative than the gas industry. So for the first time in WGC history, PETRONAS wanted to have a strong focus on youth. They worked closely with my team and I between 2009 to 2012 to try to attract these young talents back to where they really belong.
Solution
With gas being a topic that is rather dry and technical to the average person, we proposed to take it back to the grassroots level and get kids to rediscover the wonders of science in general. With that, ItsNotMagicItsScience.com was born. A STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) portal for kids and young adults alike; It was a mixture of original content and carefully curated STEM topics that was designed to make science fun, magical, cool and above all, relevant. A ‘Real Heroes’ section was included to give insight to the lives of real engineers to highlight the fact that having a science career is so much more than one could ever imagine.
Online gas themed photography and essay competitions were also carried out through the portal as a means for the organisers to identify potential future engineers. About 20 youth candidates from around the world were identified and shortlisted through the essay competition and invited to the conference to be part of a presenting youth panel.
Multiple ad banners to promote ItsNotMagicItsScience.com were also created to drive awareness of this portal and to avoid creative fatigue over the campaign period. Overall, the ads proved to be a real success – with an average clickthrough rate of 0.81% which was well above the average market performance of 0.02%.
