The difficult part of marketing a power line is that nobody wakes up wanting to think about a power line. They want the light to turn on. The same is true of a modular building, a gas network or the services that keep a remote site running. Infrastructure succeeds by receding into ordinary life. Marketing succeeds by bringing just enough of it back into view.
This is the puzzle Lisa Cooke inherited when she joined ATCO as senior vice president and chief marketing officer in September 2022. The Calgary company had been operating for roughly eight decades. Its work reached across utilities, energy infrastructure, housing and logistical support. Its people worked in several countries, often on services that customers notice most when they fail.
Cooke did not arrive as an infrastructure lifer. Her route ran through advertising, entertainment, a technology company, an arts institution and telecommunications. She had sold products and ideas to consumers and businesses. She had worked on digital channels, customer experience, brand systems and internal communications. That variety looks eclectic until you notice the recurring assignment: take an organization with many moving parts and make it understandable.
01 · Find the sentence
The nine-part answer
Ask a diversified company what it does and the honest answer can become a tour of the org chart. One ATCO marketer publicly joked that his response used to be a nine-part answer. It is a familiar corporate trap. Accuracy accumulates clauses. Every division wants a noun. By the end, the audience has learned many facts and retained no picture.
Cooke’s team compressed ATCO’s public story around three fields: housing, energy and defence. In May 2026, she introduced the company’s global Possibilities for Generations campaign as an expression of that frame. The work connected an old Canadian company to a forward-looking promise: what gets built now shapes the conditions in which later generations will live.
One company, three public doors
Places people can use
Systems daily life depends on
Services that protect what matters
The organizing idea: present work, long horizon. The frame is simple enough to remember while leaving room for the businesses beneath it.
Compression is easy when you are willing to be vague. The harder version keeps enough specificity to be true. Housing, energy and defence are not mood words. They are categories of work. “Generations” supplies the time horizon, turning a list of operations into a question of stewardship.
The campaign was filmed across countries and regions of Canada. Its production credits, shared publicly by Cooke and colleagues, stretch across an internal marketing and communications team, outside partners, employees and on-screen talent. That list matters. A single sentence on the outside often requires broad agreement on the inside.
02 · Learn the institution
A career built in translation
Cooke studied public relations and journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School, with a minor in business. It is an unusually tidy foundation for the work that followed. Journalism asks what is true and relevant. Public relations asks how institutions speak. Business asks whether the result can survive contact with incentives, budgets and operations.
Her early career included Solomon Friedman Advertising, Twentieth Century Fox and the agency Trigger. She later worked in strategy and communications at Keywork Labs. The environments changed, but each offered a different lesson in attention: how entertainment creates desire, how agencies sharpen a proposition and how a technology company explains something unfamiliar.
The working education
At Banff Centre, she became vice president of marketing and communications during a consequential identity project. In 2016, the institution added “for Arts and Creativity” to its name and introduced its first major graphic identity update in more than 30 years. Cooke described the change as a signal of clarity and focus that still honored the centre’s location in Canada’s first national park.
That formulation foreshadows her ATCO work. A legacy institution needs room to move, but history is part of the product. The marketer’s job is not to choose between past and future. It is to locate the thread that makes both coherent.
From 2017 through 2022, Cooke moved through senior roles at Shaw Communications and Freedom Mobile. Her remit included advertising, consumer marketing, digital sales, brand and customer experience. Telecom is where an abstract network becomes a monthly bill, a device, a service interaction and a decision to stay or leave. A brand promise can be tested every day.
03 · Make alignment visible
The operator inside the marketer
Former colleagues describe Cooke in operational terms. One person who reported to her recalled a leader who could visualize a project from beginning to end, give direct and goal-oriented feedback, move quickly and keep some fun in the work. Another colleague, writing about a digital business transformation at Shaw, emphasized her ability to build relationships, adapt when requirements changed and secure support across functions.
Those observations complicate the popular picture of a chief marketing officer as the keeper of campaigns. Large brand work is a coordination problem. Legal, finance, operations, leadership and front-line teams all hold pieces of the truth. A marketer can write around their disagreement for a while. A durable story requires resolving it.
Cooke’s public habit of naming collaborators offers a small clue. Her campaign announcement thanked individual teammates, the wider ATCO marketing group, production partners and executive support. It read less like the solitary unveiling of an idea than a roll call. For work intended to unify a global company, that is not incidental etiquette. It demonstrates how the idea traveled.
She has also kept one foot in civic and cultural work. Cooke served on the board of Calgary’s National accessArts Centre from February 2021 to June 2024. At Shaw, she spoke about the Pride Marches On art walk, launched in 2020 when public gathering was difficult. The project used outdoor art to create a shared civic experience. Both roles sit outside the ordinary telecom or utility brief, but they sharpen the same muscle: understanding how institutions meet communities in public.
04 · Go where the work is
The story has to travel
In July 2026, Cooke visited ATCO operations in Western Australia with board members and senior leaders. The itinerary included a gas depot in Jandakot, a structures manufacturing plant in Hope Valley and an employee gathering where the group presented growth plans and introduced the new brand platform.
A factory tour might seem far from a CMO’s natural habitat. It is probably the opposite. Marketing infrastructure from a desk creates language that floats above the work. Standing where structures are made and systems maintained supplies friction, detail and faces. It also gives employees the chance to test whether the new story describes what they actually do.
Cooke wrote afterward that ATCO’s people make possibilities real. The phrase works because it pushes the abstract promise back toward labor. Communities are built. Homes and businesses are powered. Valuable things are protected. Someone performs each verb.
Her first-year reflection at ATCO carried a similar emphasis. After attending the Invictus Games in Düsseldorf, she wrote about learning from people committed to a sustainable, equitable and prosperous future. ATCO’s association with the Canadian military community later included recognition as a Veteran Employment Champion in 2025. Cooke attended the Ottawa event alongside executives, veterans and employee resource group members.
The connective idea in these moments is participation. A global brand does not become global because the same advertisement appears in multiple countries. It becomes global when people in those places can locate themselves inside the promise.
05 · Leave something usable
Clarity as infrastructure
There is a practical lesson in Cooke’s path for anyone trying to explain a complicated business. Begin with the audience’s obvious question. Use categories they already understand. Make the claim concrete enough that operations can prove it. Give the organization a time horizon larger than the next campaign. Then take the language back to the people doing the work.
This sounds simple because a good framework conceals its scaffolding. The same is true of the infrastructure ATCO sells. The finished building hides the coordination that put it there. Reliable energy hides thousands of decisions. A clear corporate sentence hides negotiation, editing and restraint.
Cooke’s career has moved steadily closer to essential systems, from stories and screens to networks and physical assets. Yet the work remains human-sized. What does this institution mean? Why should someone care? Can an employee say it without a script?
An 80-year-old company will never fit completely inside a campaign. It should not. The useful ambition is smaller and harder: create an entrance. Under Cooke, ATCO’s entrance is a three-part frame and a generational promise. Walk through it and the complexity is still there, waiting. Now it has a shape.