Ampcontrol
An Energising Rebrand
Ampcontrol’s story began in a small shed in Newcastle, founded by four friends in 1968. Over the years, it has grown into Australia’s largest privately-owned engineering company, leading the charge in advanced global manufacturing, innovations, and solutions across the resources, infrastructure, and energy sectors. However, despite this remarkable growth into multiple markets and regions, their awareness remains surprisingly low. Ampcontrol’s complex structure and diverse offerings often means many are confused by what they do, and those that do know Ampcontrol mostly associate them with mining.
In recent years, Ampcontrol has taken considerable steps to scale up, diversify and focus their business on renewable energy, aiming to collaborate with businesses to decarbonise. United by a common vision to support the growth of the Hunter region, OOTS secured the opportunity to realign Ampcontrol’s brand with this new business direction. Our challenge was clear: redefine their brand proposition, strategy and visual identity to fuel their journey towards a greener and cleaner world.
WHAT DID WE DO?
Partnering with GUTS Creative, the process began with conducting extensive research and gathering insights from both internal and external stakeholders. This valuable information was distilled into key themes, with the following brand pillars and strategic directions established:
Vision – To lead the global energy revolution
Purpose – Transform the world through collaboration
Customer Value Proposition – To challenge the future
Our next step was to take this strategy and breathe life into it. The goal was to create a brand identity that inherited a future-focused, open-minded, and inspiring approach, and one that resonated with innovators, problem solvers and visionaries who wanted to be part of the solution. A crucial step in the process was recognising the need to shift Ampcontrol’s key personality traits from being technical and literal to bold, inspiring and exciting.
Our creative process kicked off with top level conceptualisation that involved brainstorms, generating ideas and moodboards. These steps ignited the creative juices that allowed us to dive into the design and execution phase, where we experimented and fleshed out designs but always came back to the research and strategy to inform all creative decisions.
Our exploration of different techniques and visual elements led us to the development of a dynamic and multi-dimensional brand identity that went beyond just visual appeal, but one that truly embodies the innovation, creativity and human ingenuity behind Ampcontrol’s passion and vision to work with customers to challenge the future.
THE RESULTS
A pivotal part of the brand evolution involved crafting a series of ‘building blocks’ that formed a cohesive design system to communicate the visual identity and effectively encapsulate what Ampcontrol stands for. The goal was to equip the internal marketing and design team with a comprehensive brand guidelines and a versatile toolkit that could be adapted across various formats while maintaining a unified brand presence at every touchpoint.
The iconic sine wave from Ampcontrol’s logo was embraced as a central visual element, symbolising progress and momentum. As an element that could be scaled up or down, rotated, overlapped, integrated with textures or masked to house photography, meant versatility to layouts, adaptability across brand elements and added visual intrigue. The visual association to the infinity symbol also echoes Ampcontrol’s revolutionary mindset and limitless ambition to challenge the future.
Colours and gradients also played a crucial part to add vibrancy and dimension across the new identity. With a strong association of orange already, we wanted to leverage this brand equity and maintain this as the primary colour, but amp up the range of ‘accent’ colours to help invigorate the brand, evoke excitement and provide a visual celebration of Ampcontrol’s innovation and impact.
Elevating imagery was next and became a paramount step in the process. Moving away from the mundane and literal technical shots that are typical of this industry, we wanted the photography to be inspirational and future focused. We worked closely with the marketing team on an extensive shot list and organised a 2 day photography shoot to help capture Amcontrol’s expertise and ingenuity. Simultaneous to this, we sourced external conceptual imagery that would be used to better represent Ampcontrol’s revolutionary work and transformative endeavours.
Textures were added as the final layer, achieved through a combination of vector graphics and an electric glow. This finishing touch was the final piece of the puzzle to help tie all the elements together and contribute to the overall vibrancy and energy of the brand.
“The talented teams and partnership between OOTS and GUTS significantly enhanced the entire development and execution journey of our new brand, from the initial concept to the ultimate realisation of our new vision, purpose, and unique customer value proposition. They aligned with our strong commitment and company values of innovation, collaboration, and performance. They infused the project with knowledgeable customer insights and engaging B2B creative solutions, expertly oversaw the production process with agility, and delivered exceptional results, culminating in an exciting new visual identity for Ampcontrol to challenge the future of our industry.”
The dynamic look of the brand elements came to life in the OOTS edit suites. A two-day video shoot was used to capture footage of Ampcontrol employees in action and video elements for future video asset usage.
The animated “dynamic fibre” device seamlessly links scenes and is used to highlight Ampcontrol’s expertise and innovations.
With numerous brand elements and layers brought into life through motion graphics, the production team created a series of video openers, closers, title animations and moving background textures for Ampcontrol to utilise internally. To complement the video work, a suite of audio branding files were created to work alongside various logo animations.
The results of these components coming together was a really dynamic, creative and visually expressive identity that not only has cut through but explicitly encapsulates Ampcontrol’s bold vision.
From the rollout of print collateral, document and presentation templates, large format printing and OOH executions through to video animations and digital assets, it has been a great learning curve and privilege to work with the Ampcontrol marketing team to translate the strategic vision into a visual language that resonates, and see this come to fruition – a testament to the power of research-backed strategy, innovative thinking and collaboration. We are super proud of the result and look forward to what a continued partnership in the future brings. Watch this space.