Ashley Santor, Co-Founder and CEO Utilities can invest billions in energy efficiency, electrification and grid modernization, but those investments deliver results only when customers understand the opportunity and choose to participate. For Santor, that made communication more than the final marketing layer around an energy program. It became part of what determines whether the program works.
That conviction helped shape Doer/Maker when Santor cofounded the firm in 2019.
She saw an industry spending heavily on important programs while often communicating them through the familiar language of compliance, convention and risk management. Her proposition was different. “We saw an opportunity to bring more creativity, humanity and personality to the way energy is discussed,” says Santor, co-founder and CEO.
Doer/Maker works exclusively in energy and sustainability, bringing strategy, creative thinking and data science together to help utilities and clean energy organizations understand not simply what message to put into the market, but what will move different customers from awareness to participation.
Strategy, Data and Creativity in One Loop
Most agencies separate strategy, data and creative into stages. Doer/Maker deliberately keeps them in conversation. Santor shapes the strategy, Brent Sitterly grounds the work in data science and Ricky Murray leads the creative thinking, allowing each discipline to influence the problem before shaping the solution. “Rather than thinking of it as a timeline where we need data first, then strategy and then creativity, I see it more as a continuous cycle,” says Santor.
The value of their interplay came into focus in Doer/ Maker’s work with Con Edison, which needed to improve participation in energy-efficiency programs among multifamily buildings and small businesses across New York City. The team combined energy use, geographic and building data into a machine-learning propensity model that showed who was most likely to participate and who would need a different reason to act. Instead of chasing only the easiest conversions, Doer/Maker used those differences to shape communications around varying levels of readiness.
The data did not dictate the message. It gave the team a more precise understanding of the audience, leaving strategy and creative judgment to determine what happened next.
“Data science gives us a framework for making better decisions, but the final decisions always remain human,” says Sitterly.
-
Rather than thinking of it as a timeline where we need data first, then strategy and then creativity, I see it more as a continuous cycle where each element feeds the others.
The same principle shapes the firm’s approach to AI. Technology can narrow possibilities and strengthen decisions, but human judgment remains the final filter. For Santor and her team, the value of AI lies in what it helps people understand, not replacing those responsible for them.
A Light-Bulb Moment, Taken Literally
Sometimes the insight is simpler than the data behind it. When Philadelphia electric utility PECO approached Doer/Maker about encouraging customers to switch to LED bulbs, it believed there was little new left to say about lighting.
Research challenged that assumption. Of roughly 1,000 customers surveyed, about 80% said they knew what an LED was, yet only about 20% of that group knew what the letters stood for. “Instead of treating it as a typical knowledge gap, we turned the finding into an interactive campaign encouraging customers to adopt more energy-efficient lighting,” shares Murray.
Then the idea moved into the street. The team wrapped a PECO bucket truck in 4,000 LED lights and drove it through communities, pairing an unexpected encounter with access to discounted bulbs. Doer/Maker was only about six months old and had expected PECO to reject the idea. When it said yes, Santor recalls, “we kind of panicked.”
The truck became a calling card, but Santor says the real value was the association it created between a utility and “a moment of happiness, surprise and delight.” PECO measured the campaign against both marketing performance and energy savings, and Doer/ Maker later adapted the concept for four other utilities.
As clean-energy choices grow more complex, this approach would help more utilities connect technical possibility with public participation, making Doer/Maker a fitting choice for Manage Marketing's Top Strategic Brand Marketing Services 2026.
