Ads featuring wind send a powerful message

 If you were watching the NFL playoffs this weekend, you might have seen this ad for Duracell batteries. The brilliant 30-second spot demonstrates the ability of wind turbines to help deliver a powerful, positive message, even when the subject is only tangentially related to wind. It is batteries that are being advertised, after all, and they could be powering anything–a digital camera, for instance. But here they are being used to power a voltmeter, a key piece of safety equipment used by wind technicians when they are performing maintenance on a turbine. But wait–there's more. The technicians using the meter–and who are photographed standing dramatically atop the towers–are students at a wind technician training course at Iowa Lakes Community College, a school that pioneered wind tech training several years ago. The result: at the end of the 30 seconds, the positive wind energy message, along with a submessage about education, is as memorable as the Duracell battery, perhaps more so, because of the turbines' sheer visual presence as they gently dominate the bucolic rural landscape while a child stares up at them in awe from a passing automobile.