CAIRN ENERGY PLC
How can a website show growth and transformation?
Cairn Energy is an independent oil and gas exploration, development and production company, with a variety of assets in the UK & Norway and along the Atlantic Margin. The business is focused on creating, adding and delivering value from a balanced portfolio.

THE CHALLENGE
Cairn was seeking to outline its investment story as the business had been transformed from its historical focus in South Asia to a business creating value and exploration success from frontier and emerging basins supported by production assets located in mature basins.
The issue was that Cairn’s website no longer reflected the business's strategy and potential. What’s more, it was overladen with content. At the very least, the business needed a responsive and contemporary website.


THE APPROACH
To understand what Cairn and its customers needed from a corporate website, we interviewed and held workshops with communications, HR, IR, sustainability and IT teams.
Then, after a detailed peer and analytics review, we created a proposition for the content, structure and user journey.

After refining the website’s architecture, we set to work creating compelling imagery, video and infographics, including interactive maps of key assets.
New photography included a wider range of people on the ground, giving a greater sense of the diversity and reach of business operations.



We cut lengthy content to bring relevant material to the fore, refreshing the site and making it easier to access and navigate. We also encouraged the addition of new employee profile videos within the careers section, which is one of the most visited sections of the new site.
While all this was happening, we also created a dormant crisis website. This way, the Cairn team, could launch a reduced version of the website should an emergency event occur.

THE RESULT
CairnEnergy.com truly reflects Cairn’s business model and strategy. It’s fresh, contemporary and in line with the company’s wider corporate communications activity, including the annual report which we also produced.
The website has been seen as a “significant achievement” for reflecting the company’s transformation in the last decade. What’s more, employees also view it as a vital tool and page views were up 25% within months.
Emperor was extremely professional throughout the entire process of creating, designing and building the new corporate website; the team spent time to understand the business and what was required. The result was excellent and we now have a website which is in line with our other corporate materials and collateral.
- Cairn Energy Corporate Affairs