TotalEnergies: The Roads to Carbon Neutral

Challenge

For global energy companies, the challenge is no longer talking about the energy transition; it is proving it – especially hard in a category shaped by complexity, skepticism and competing expectations around growth, energy security, and decarbonisation. For TotalEnergies, the challenge was not simply visibility, but trust – how to communicate the realities of transitioning to lower-carbon energy in a way that felt credible, balanced and globally relevant. The opportunity was to move beyond conventional brand communications and create a storytelling platform grounded in real-world implementation, operational scale and trusted editorial context.

Strategic Solution

Our campaign aimed to reposition TotalEnergies within the energy transition conversation by shifting audience perception from corporate ambition to practical implementation. The objective was to engage influential business and policy audiences through credible, evidence-led storytelling that demonstrates how lower-carbon solutions are being deployed across industries and at operational scale.

The strategy was built on a critical insight – credibility in the energy transition is not established through messaging alone, but through visibility into how change is actually happening. For highly informed audiences, abstract sustainability narratives often lack relevance unless grounded in tangible action, industry realities and measurable progress.

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This led to a deliberate move away from conventional corporate communications towards a documentary-led storytelling approach rooted in real-world experience. Rather than centring the brand itself, the campaign focused on the people, technologies and infrastructure shaping the transition across sectors including aviation, freight, manufacturing and urban mobility.

To bring this to life, CNBC and TotalEnergies developed The Roads to Carbon Neutral as a long-form, multi-platform storytelling platform spanning premium video, digital features, podcasts, and social content. The editorial authority of the CNBC brandplayed a central role in reinforcing credibility, allowing stories to be told through a trusted journalistic lens rather than a purely commercial one.

The campaign was also designed as an evolving content ecosystem rather than a single awareness burst. Each story explored a different pathway towards carbon neutrality, creating a broader narrative around innovation, collaboration and implementation at scale.

By combining trusted editorial storytelling with operationally grounded narratives, the strategy shifted the conversation from aspiration to action, positioning TotalEnergies as a credible partner in navigating the realities of the energy transition.

Content Solution

Rather than simplifying the energy transition into a polished corporate narrative and treating it as a message to explain, The Roads to Carbon Neutral approached it as a subject to explore.

The creative approach was built around the idea that influential business audiences do not engage with sustainability through simplified corporate claims, but through depth, nuance and discovery. Instead of presenting polished corporate or idealised sustainability narratives, the campaign focused on real people, operational environments and industrial-scale innovation, immersing audiences into the realities, trade-offs and operational complexity involved in transitioning towards lower-carbon systems across industries.

This philosophy shaped the entire content ecosystem. Rather than functioning as a one-off branded content series, The Roads to Carbon Neutral was designed as an evolving editorial franchise exploring the energy transition across industries, technologies and geographies over time. Long-form branded films served as the narrative anchor, bringing audiences inside industrial environments, infrastructure systems and real-world operations through documentary-led storytelling. Rather than centring TotalEnergies as the sole voice within the narrative, the content prioritised broader industry perspectives, collaboration and lived experience, allowing the transition to unfold through people, processes and implementation.

The editorial lens of the CNBC brand played a critical role in reinforcing credibility, ensuring stories were framed through journalistic exploration rather than promotional messaging, creating content that felt credible and engaging for highly informed business and policy audiences.

Importantly, each content format was intentionally designed to support a different level of audience engagement. The films created immersion and emotional connection, while immersive feature articles expanded on technical context and industry insights. Podcasts and vodcasts introduced a conversational layer of storytelling, enabling deeper exploration of themes and perspectives. The campaign hub unified these experiences into a single destination, encouraging audiences to move fluidly between formats and progressively deepen their understanding of the transition. This layered approach allowed audiences to engage with the transition progressively over time, mirroring the transition itself.

Innovation came not from simplifying complexity, but from making complexity itself engaging. The campaign deliberately avoided idealised portrayals of sustainability in favour of operational realism, recognising that credibility with influential audiences is built through transparency, depth, and evidence of implementation.

By combining documentary storytelling, editorial authority and an evolving, multi-format editorial ecosystem, The Roads to Carbon Neutral transformed the energy transition from a distant corporate ambition into an evolving subject audiences could actively explore, positioning TotalEnergies as a credible participant in shaping a lower-carbon future.

Media/Content Amplification Solution

The amplification strategy was built around a strategically integrated paid media approach, designed around a central principle, that credibility is shaped not only by what audiences see, but where they encounter it.

For a campaign addressing the realities of the energy transition, distribution through trusted business and policy environments was critical. Rather than prioritising broad consumer reach, the strategy focused on embedding The Roads to Carbon Neutral within the business, policy and market ecosystems, where influential audiences already engage with global markets, infrastructure, sustainability and economic transformation.

CNBC’s international network became the campaign’s primary amplification engine. Linear television played a particularly important role, not simply for scale, but for editorial adjacency and authority. By integrating the campaign within CNBC’s global business programming, The Roads to Carbon Neutral was consistently positioned alongside market analysis, geopolitical coverage and executive interviews, reinforcing the campaign’s relevance among highly informed audiences.

Digital and social amplification extended this influence through more targeted engagement strategies. Rather than deploying identical content across platforms, the campaign structured amplification around different levels of audience intent and attention. Long-form video and editorial content targeted audiences seeking deeper industry understanding, while shorter-form social assets created more accessible entry points into complex topics such as sustainable aviation, freight and infrastructure transformation.

Audience targeting focused specifically on senior business and policy communities. Using CNBC’s first-party audience data and AI-powered targeting capabilities, the campaign reached executives, investors and decision-makers across energy, finance, sustainability and industrial sectors. This precision-led approach ensured content appeared within environments already trusted by audiences with influence over investment, policy and business strategy.

The amplification ecosystem was further strengthened through streaming inventory, homepage takeovers and high-impact, premium digital placements, which sustained visibility and reinforced repeat engagement across the campaign lifestyle.

By combining trusted editorial adjacency, precision targeting and multi-format amplification, the strategy extended The Roads to Carbon Neutral beyond branded storytelling, positioning it as part of a broader global conversation around the realities of the energy transition.

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CNBC viewers more likely to be aware of TotalEnergies.

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People more likely to recognise that innovation sits at the cornerstone of TotalEnergies' strategy.

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Rank for sustainability against energy sector peers.

Results

The campaign delivered strong results across reach, engagement and audience quality, validating the effectiveness of implementation-led storytelling in building credibility around the energy transition.

Across all channels, The Roads to Carbon Neutral generated hundreds of millions of impressions through an integrated ecosystem spanning linear television, digital, social, branded content and streaming platforms.

Crucially, the results demonstrated that influential audiences were willing to spend meaningful time engaging with nuanced, implementation-led stories. The branded content hub and supporting editorial ecosystem sustained deep audience engagement, with time spent consistently exceeding typical consumption behaviours. Performance across digital and social platforms further validated this. Social activity generated millions of views, with exceptionally strong completion rates across platforms outperforming CNBC Brand Studio’s historical branded content benchmarks. On YouTube, completion rates exceeded internal benchmarks by more than 9x, indicating sustained engagement with longer-form storytelling.

Beyond media metrics, the campaign delivered powerfully against TotalEnergies three core objectives:

Awareness: by the end of our 2025 campaign, CNBC viewers were 1.3 times more likely to be aware of TotalEnergies; one of the strongest uplifts vs control across the whole sector.
Innovation: among audiences that saw our campaign, people were 1.2x more likely to recognize that innovation is the cornerstone of TotalEnergies’ strategy.
Sustainability: in a major achievement that reflects the long term nature of our partnership, for the first time, in 2025, TotalEnergies ranked #1 for sustainability against energy sector peers, among audiences that saw our campaign.

Together, these results demonstrate meaningful progress towards shifting the conversation around TotalEnergies from corporate sustainability messaging to credible, implementation-led storytelling. By sustaining deep engagement within trusted business environments, The Roads to Carbon Neutral strengthened TotalEnergies’ relevance and credibility among influential global audiences navigating the complexities of the energy transition.