Central Maine Power has launched a branding and workplace initiative to counter recent negative publicity.
The Power On campaign, which includes radio and television ads portraying the importance of reliable electricity in people’s daily lives, is intended to bring about change to the company to help improve customer service, the electricity company announced in a Facebook post Wednesday.
The utility company has been under scrutiny the past two years after it rolled out a new billing software linked to ongoing customer complaints. State utility regulators are scheduled to release findings Jan. 30 of their investigation into the company’s earnings and the customer complaint issue.
The message of the ads is that CMP has delivered power to Mainers for the last century and that it’s working to regain customer trust, Portland Press Herald reported.
CMP has also lobbied for approval of a transmission corridor through Maine that would bring hydropower from Quebec to the regional power grid to meet Massachusetts’ clean energy goals. Several towns along the proposed 145-mile (233-kilometer) corridor have reversed their earlier support of the controversial $1 billion project, which is awaiting approval from the from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Land Use Planning Commission.
Democratic Rep. Seth Berry criticized the ad campaign.
“CMP’s new ads take the cake,” Berry wrote in a Facebook post. He wrote that the ads imply employees are to blame for past mistakes and not a company with “multinational monopoly ownership.”
CMP is a subsidiary of Connecticut-based Avangrid, which itself is a subsidiary of Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company.
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