Kingo and Ogilvy Reframe Solar Access as the World's Biggest Clean Energy Sign-Up
Kingo's 2018 campaign, "Creating the Largest Clean Energy User Base in History," produced by Ogilvy Colombia and Ogilvy Guatemala, is a documentary-style film that reframes the commercial growth of a prepaid solar energy service operating in off-grid communities across Colombia and Central America as a world-scale social movement, positioning Kingo's pay-as-you-go model as both a viable consumer product and a historic act of collective transformation.
Published in Colombia in May 2018, the campaign arrives at a moment when Kingo's business model is already structured around replacing unsafe and expensive energy sources — kerosene lamps, candles, disposable batteries — with affordable, prepaid solar electricity delivered to households that have no reliable connection to a national grid. The campaign does not sell hardware in the conventional consumer durables sense. Instead, it sells participation: the act of becoming a Kingo subscriber is framed as enlisting in the largest clean energy user base in history, making the commercial transaction inseparable from the social-impact narrative.
The campaign's single film asset carries the full weight of that ambition. Shot in the documentary tradition, it uses the visual grammar of social experiment filmmaking to move between the intimate — a family switching on a light for the first time — and the planetary, connecting individual subscribers in rural Colombia and Guatemala to a cumulative count of clean energy users that the brand positions as an unprecedented global milestone. Ogilvy Colombia and Ogilvy Guatemala co-created the work, with the campaign submitted to international awards circuits where it earned recognition across multiple years and categories, confirming its standing as one of the defining pieces of industrial and consumer durables advertising to emerge from Colombia in 2018.
Kingo operates in the off-grid solar home-system and pay-as-you-go energy-access market, a sector distinct from conventional consumer durables retail. In Colombia and across Latin America, the strategic pressure in 2018 centres on a large population living beyond the reach of reliable grid infrastructure, for whom energy poverty is not an abstraction but a daily constraint on health, education, and economic activity. According to GOGLA, the global off-grid solar industry association, the pay-as-you-go solar home-system sector generated approximately one hundred fifty to two hundred million dollars in revenue in 2016, with projections indicating growth toward six to seven billion dollars by 2022, reflecting the scale of unmet demand that Kingo is positioned to serve.
The broader competitive landscape for Kingo in Colombia and Central America includes established players in the PAYGO solar sector such as M-KOPA, which operates primarily across sub-Saharan Africa, and d.light, a global off-grid solar company with a similarly technology-led product range. What distinguishes Kingo's 2018 campaign strategy, as documented by latinspots.com, is the decision to reframe competitive differentiation away from product specification entirely and toward narrative scale: rather than competing on panel wattage or payment terms, Ogilvy Colombia positions Kingo as the architect of a historic collective milestone, making subscriber growth itself the product story. This is a strategic insight rooted in the social texture of the communities Kingo serves, where belonging to something larger than an individual household carries genuine cultural weight. The campaign's documentary approach, combining elements of social experiment filmmaking with the visual honesty associated with journalistic reportage, is the direct executional expression of that insight.
Director Juan Pablo Caballero shapes the campaign's single film asset as a documentary, a formal choice that carries strategic consequences beyond aesthetics. The documentary mode carries an implicit contract of authenticity with its audience: what the camera records happened, the people shown are real, and the story being told is not constructed for persuasive effect even when it is. For a campaign asking viewers to believe that a prepaid solar company in Colombia is building the largest clean energy user base in history, that contract is load-bearing.
Production company Los Notarios handles the physical production of the film, with post-production completed by David Studio. The creative architecture behind the work is built across two Ogilvy offices: John Raúl Forero, serving as Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Latam, provides regional creative leadership, while Juan Pablo Álvarez, Vice President of Creative at Ogilvy Colombia, and Ramiro Eduardo, Vice President of Creative at Ogilvy Guatemala, shape the executional direction in their respective markets, as documented by latinspots.com. Iván Rivera, Executive Creative Director and Associated Creative Director at Ogilvy Colombia, and Camilo Ruano, Head of Art at Ogilvy Colombia, complete the senior creative team on the project. Juan Mauricio Wurmser, President and General Manager of Wurmser Ogilvy and Mather Guatemala, contributes operational leadership from the Guatemalan office.
The film's social experiment grammar — placing real community members in situations designed to surface genuine emotional response — is consistent with the tradition of observational documentary practice. The camera does not explain the significance of what it shows; it trusts the accumulation of individual moments to construct the argument for scale. That restraint is itself a craft decision, and it is the quality that most directly connects the film's form to the campaign's central claim. As reported by shots.net, the work's creative credibility was recognised at the highest level of international advertising, with the Cannes Lions jury in 2018 finding the campaign sufficient to award a Grand Prix in the Product Design Lions category.
Kingo's 2018 campaign earns a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Product Design Lions category, awarded to Ogilvy Colombia, Ogilvy Guatemala, and Kingo Energy, as confirmed by latinspots.com and shots.net. The announcement was made publicly by Kingo on June 22, 2018, according to reporting documented across latinspots.com and campaignlive.co.uk. The campaign subsequently receives a Gold Pencil at The One Show in 2019, and a Cannes Lions Bronze in the Creative Business Transformation Lions category in 2021, as reported by latinspots.com, establishing a multi-year awards trajectory that is unusual for a single campaign asset.
The Grand Prix in Product Design is a category distinction worth noting. The jury's decision to place this work in product design rather than film or branded content reflects a reading of the campaign as inseparable from the Kingo service model itself: the advertising is not a representation of the product but a component of its market-facing design. That structural interpretation reinforces the campaign's central strategic claim, that subscriber growth and narrative scale are the same thing.
No verified third-party consumer performance data — subscriber acquisition numbers, conversion rates, or brand awareness metrics tied directly to the campaign's publication period — is publicly available for this campaign. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting strong creative and strategic ambition offset by the limited availability of independently verified commercial outcome data. The campaign's documented impact is primarily awards-circuit validation and the public credibility associated with Leonardo DiCaprio's investment in Kingo and his advisory role, announced as part of the 2018 campaign, as reported by latinspots.com and seaf.com.
Kingo's 2018 campaign is a documentary-style film created by Ogilvy Colombia and Ogilvy Guatemala. It frames Kingo's prepaid solar energy service, designed for off-grid communities in Colombia and Central America, as the foundation of the world's largest clean energy user base, turning subscriber growth into a social movement narrative.
The Kingo campaign won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Product Design Lions category in 2018. The award was presented to Ogilvy Colombia, Ogilvy Guatemala, and Kingo Energy. According to latinspots.com, Kingo publicly announced the win on June 22, 2018. The campaign also won a Gold Pencil at The One Show in 2019.
Leonardo DiCaprio invested in Kingo and served as an advisor to the company. His involvement was announced as part of the 2018 campaign, as reported by latinspots.com and seaf.com. The association added global profile to Kingo's positioning as a serious clean energy company operating in off-grid markets across Colombia and Central America.
Juan Pablo Caballero directed the campaign film. Los Notarios served as the production company, with post-production handled by David Studio, as documented by clapboard.com. The film's documentary format was a deliberate creative decision by a senior team spanning Ogilvy Colombia and Ogilvy Guatemala, led at the regional level by Chief Creative Officer John Raúl Forero.
Kingo delivers prepaid solar power hardware and service to off-grid households, placing it within industrial and consumer durables advertising. The 2018 campaign, published in Colombia, promotes a pay-as-you-go solar home system that replaces kerosene and candles, making Kingo's offer a tangible product even as the campaign frames it as a social movement.
The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative and strategic ambition, a Cannes Grand Prix in Product Design, and a multi-year awards record, balanced against the limited availability of independently verified commercial performance data from the campaign's 2018 publication period in Colombia.
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