When we sat down to find the face (or faces) of VoltX Energy, the brief to our creative agency, Tiny Giants, was simple to write and hard to deliver: find someone Australians would trust with a big-ticket decision, someone who wouldn't put their name to a brand unless they actually believed in it. We also did alot of research internally to find the right fit.
Home batteries are a considered purchase. People don't buy one on impulse. They research, they compare quotes, they ask the neighbour who already got one. So, the ambassador question wasn't "who's famous right now?" It was "who would a sceptical, bill-conscious Aussie homeowner actually listen to?"
We didn't land on Michael and Steve alone. Choosing the right VoltX Energy brand ambassadors was a joint effort: we worked with our agency, Sweeney Advertising, on the ambassador strategy from the outset. Once the direction was set, both teams worked directly with each ambassador's management to shape roles that felt true to who they actually are, rather than scripts imposed on them.
The Competitive Landscape: Everyone Else Reached for an Athlete
Before we locked in our direction, we looked at what the rest of the solar and battery category was doing—and the pattern was unmistakable. It's a category built almost entirely on sporting champions. Fox ESS, now the number one battery brand in the Australian market, has Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe as its brand ambassador. Solar Power Nation has gone further still, running former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke alongside Olympic gold medallist and world record holder Kyle Chalmers. GoodWe recently signed wicketkeeper Alex Carey, who is installing a full solar and battery system at his own home as part of the partnership. Even overseas, the same playbook holds—Indian solar manufacturer Alpex signed cricket legend Rahul Dravid to endorse its renewable energy push.
Cricket gets its own dedicated corner of the category, too. Sunboost, one of the country's largest solar retailers, has run former Australian Test captain Allan Border as its brand ambassador since 2017, and more recently added fast-bowling great Glenn McGrath—who counts Sunboost among his current partnerships alongside Toyota—to the same roster.
Champion athletes bring credibility through performance and aspiration. But they also mean every solar brand in the country is essentially borrowing the same kind of equity—someone impressive, someone elite, someone slightly out of reach. Swimmers, cricket captains, Olympic gold medallists: it's an entire category built on podiums. We wanted the opposite. We wanted someone who felt like the bloke next door, not the person on it.
Enter Michael Caton: The Trusted Aussie Homeowner
There is arguably no better shorthand in Australian pop culture for "house-proud suburban battler" than Michael Caton. Six decades on our screens, an inductee of the Australian Film Walk of Fame, and the actor behind Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle and Ted Taylor in Packed to the Rafters. Caton's entire cultural identity is a man who loves his modest home and fights to protect it from people who'd take advantage of him. That is, almost word for word, the emotional territory of a household energy decision: don't let the big end of town rip you off, and don't let a cowboy installer near your roof.
Our own research going into the campaign put Caton's recognition among the target 35–60 demographic north of 95%, with trust scores sitting just as high. He's also, genuinely, someone who cares about protecting the environment in his own community and has a long-standing interest in solar—which mattered to us. We didn't want an ambassador who'd sign anything; we wanted one who wouldn't go near VoltX Energy unless he believed the product actually helped people.
Adding Steve "Beaver" Menzies: Local Legend, Local Bills
Caton gives us national trust. Steve Menzies gives us something different: local, sport-anchored, mortgage-literate credibility. As Manly-Warringah's most prolific try-scoring forward, a two-time premiership winner and NRL Hall of Famer, "Beaver" already carries decades of goodwill with rugby league fans across NSW. What made him a genuinely useful second ambassador, rather than just a second famous face, is what he's done since retiring: Fox Sports commentary, The Matty Johns Show, and critically a 9 year career as a mortgage broker, running his own business. He talks about household budgets and family security for a living. That's not a stretch for him to sell; it's literally his day job. It also was a natural connection for VoltX Energy - since we are a Premier Sponsor of the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles.
Putting the two together gave us a structure rather than just two names on a slide: Caton as the calm, no-nonsense explainer who reassures the broad NSW homeowner audience, and Menzies as the guy who is house-proud, sport-connected, and still learning—someone the audience can watch figure it out alongside them. Neither of them is a trend figure who might age out of relevance or become a liability overnight. Both read as "good bloke, no scandal, been around forever," which is exactly the asset a category plagued by cowboy installers and vanishing warranties actually needs.
Why the Storylines Are Built on Jokes, Not Just Facts
Once the ambassador pairing was locked, the creative task was to find a way to talk about something as unglamorous as household electricity bills without putting people to sleep, all while still landing the brand's non-negotiable messaging: VoltX Energy, "Live Every Day Fully Charged," and a clear call to visit voltxenergy.com.au and get a quote.
Humour is a well-worn tool for exactly this kind of category. It's long been used in advertising. Insurance is the classic case, where humour solves the challenge of getting an uninterested audience to notice and remember advertising for a category they don't want to think about, with brands like GEICO, Progressive and Allstate building character-driven entertainment vehicles where the brand sits inside the joke rather than beside it. Closer to home, some of Australia's most enduring campaigns work the same way: AAMI's "Talking Car" turned a mundane insurance category into memorable entertainment by giving its subject a quirky, unmistakably Australian personality, using character-driven humour to build recall in a category otherwise plagued by consumer indifference. Energy bills sit in exactly that same "necessary, forgettable, mildly resented" bucket—which made comedy, delivered by faces people already trust, the right tool rather than a risky one.
That's the thinking behind all three of the TVC directions Tiny Giants developed:
Bike Energy Generation takes the most literal, absurd version of "generating your own power"—three Sea Eagles junior pathway players, the club's up-and-coming next generation rather than the current first-grade squad, pedalling exercise bikes rigged to generators in Steve's garage, powering his family home while he paces around like a premiership-era drill sergeant. It's a sight gag with a punchline built in: Michael comes up the drive way to point out there's an easier way. It also lets us use Steve's Manly connections as a visual joke and gives the club's emerging talent some airtime, rather than just a credential on a slide.
The Beaver Documentary plays on Steve's own nickname, dropping a mock-Attenborough voiceover over Michael secretly observing "the Australian Beaver" admiring his solar panels from behind a hedge. The joke is structural: solar without a battery is only half the job—"like building half a dam"—which is both a genuinely useful explainer and, because it's Beaver, a pun we couldn't resist.
Bill Shock Support Group is the most emotionally grounded of the three, and deliberately so. It opens on something that's become a very real, very unfunny problem for a lot of Australian households—people rationing use and dreading the next bill. We wanted at least one execution that acknowledged that stress honestly, in a community-hall setting with real neighbours, before Michael (there "mainly for the pies") gently reframes what a battery actually changes: "You shouldn't need a support group to turn the kettle on." It's the softest landing of the three, and the one most likely to resonate with anyone who has genuinely felt that dread.
Across all three, the ambassadors are doing the same underlying job even though the scenarios differ: Steve represents the well-meaning homeowner who's done half the work, and Michael represents the neighbour who already solved the problem and is happy to tell you how—which mirrors, almost exactly, the way word-of-mouth actually works in a category where people don't trust ads but do trust their neighbour.
The Bet We're Making
Every other battery brand in this market is telling you an Olympian or a cricket captain uses their product. We're an Australian-owned solar battery company telling you the guy who played Darryl Kerrigan thinks you're getting ripped off, and the Sea Eagles legend down the road is still figuring it out—together, with a laugh, on your street. In a category where the biggest barrier to purchase isn't desire but fear of being taken for a ride, we'd rather be trusted than admired. It also helps that Michael has actually installed a battery with VoltX Energy and has seen a difference.
VoltX Energy — Live Every Day Fully Charged. Visit VoltXEnergy.com.au and get a quote.
