Magellan Midstream Partners

Midstream Oil & Gas Campaign Strategy

Empowering a wall street darling to become understood by mainstreet

It’s been the long standing MO of oil and gas entities—especially pipeline companies—to lay low and keep quiet when they are about to undertake a new project. A part of what they have to do is acquire the land to transport the energy that fuels America’s businesses, homes, and cars. Recently, a few pipelines have come under attack by protestors which makes it more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to build the needed infrastructure.

Magellan Midstream Partners is not one of your normal pipeline companies. They go well above and beyond the already strict regulations for building and maintaining pipelines. They also wanted to flip the script on how companies approach building new pipelines. Instead of silence about a new project, they wanted to start a dialog with the communities and the people all along the route. This would be an industry first and a bold experiment.

Gitwit concepted and executed a digital campaign that targeted all the people within approximately 10 miles either side of a new route that would run over 270 miles. Our strategy was to reach as many of these people as possible over several months with educational and engaging content built to perform on Facebook and Instagram. Our work included an in-depth landing page that invited questions from the community.

The result was massive reach and incredible engagement with people for pipelines, against pipelines, and the majority in the middle who didn’t have a strong opinion either way. The land acquisition process went smoothly. Magellan proved that “advertising” a pipeline by bringing attention to it in the right way is effective.

Digital Ads

Analytics & Findings

Engagement by Ad Type

Key Takeaway

The more subjective, debatable, or ‘teasing’ the content, the higher the engagement rate. Static ads serve as teasers, prompting the user to learn more information.

Politically Affiliated Demographics

Key Takeaway

Liberals were just as engaged with the campaign content as Conservatives. However, Conservatives shared four times as many ads. Moderates were the least engaged overall, and least likely to share.

Urban vs. Rural

Key Takeaway

People living in Urban zip codes were more engaged than Rural zip codes and much more likely to share — likely because people working in the industry are located in these Urban zip codes.