Don't Play Games with Scammers–
An El Paso Electric Anti-Scam Campaign

The Project

Every year utility scammers become more and more creative in their attempts to defraud and steal money from unsuspecting consumers. Our client El Paso Electric (EPE) is not immune from these scams. When they came to us, citing record numbers of reported scam calls aimed at their customers, we jumped at the chance to impact real change for our community. After all, we’ll match our creative messaging against a scammer any day.

The Approach

The challenge with this campaign was that El Pasoans were reaching out to EPE’s customer service team after they had received a scam call, and unfortunately at that point there was nothing that could be done. We quickly realized that this campaign would have to do more than educate our customers about the diversity of scams, it would have to empower them to be their best first defense.

Unlike previous scam campaigns, where education of the scams was the focus, we knew we needed to try something very different. It started like everything in this campaign – a phone call. EPE’s customer service reps were our first point of contact, and they were dually knowledgeable, as both defense against scams and even potential victims of scams as customers. Our “aha” moment came when their team played a pre-recorded scam call for us. Listening to the scammer and their ridiculous requests and tactics made it clear to us how to proceed.

If we could help customers get past the fear of being scammed, and pull back the veil on scammer’s attempts, we could help our community to take agency and avoid being a victim.

To create a memorable campaign, we brainstormed several directions that took shots at scammers, presenting them as obvious and buffoon-like in their efforts. Our winning concept centered around a stylized gameshow that featured “contestants” easily spotting various scams. We called it “Legit or Scam” and got to work on production of campaign elements.

Creating a gameshow from scratch was a fun and challenging undertaking for our art department and production team. TV was our flagship medium and was supported by digital ads, digital video, streaming TV featuring QR codes and broadcast and streaming audio.

The Results

Executing this one-of-a-kind campaign was not only fun, but it was also memorable and ultimately effective. Over the course of the campaign, we received great engagement on ads, saw a 75% reduction in calls reporting scams and saw an increase in online reporting of scam calls. Not only did we educate our community, but we encouraged them to act against scams.

Ready to launch your campaign? Reach out to Gabriel.Acuna@CultureSpanMarketing.com and we can start
a conversation today.