Reaching Unexpected Audiences Through Unscripted Reality
Presented by Potential Energy Coalition
Unscripted storytelling can reach the audiences who've already tuned out climate messaging. And there's a story ready-made for it that many people are experiencing: the insurance crisis. Premiums spiking. Coverage vanishing. Whole neighborhoods suddenly uninsurable. Most people don't connect any of it to climate change yet, but they're already feeling it in their bank accounts and their neighborhoods. That's what makes this story so powerful: it doesn't ask anyone to identify as an environmentalist. It just asks them to look at their bill.
We brought together leaders across unscripted storytelling, including documentary film, reality television, and podcasting, to discuss how to tell this story in a way that is entertaining and reaches new audiences. This session will explore questions like: What makes a skeptical viewer lean in instead of tuning out? How do you film real people so they feel like real people, not actors hitting marks? How do you meet an audience where they already are, without losing them? And why might unscripted—messy, unpolished, human—be exactly the format that can tell this story, and other climate stories still waiting to be told?
Featured Speakers
Eric Asche, CEO of Potential Energy Coalition
Cyle Zezo, President and Founder, Reality of Change
Dior Rodriguez, Filmmaker
Jason Tartick
Moderator
Nicole Dorrler, Global Head of Marketing and Brands at Potential Energy Coalition
By attending, you consent to being photographed, filmed, and/or otherwise recorded. Your entry constitutes your consent to such photography, filming, and/or recording and to any use, in any and all media, in perpetuity, of your appearance, voice, and name for any purpose whatsoever in connection with the event.
Speaker Bios:
Nicole Dorrler, Global Head of Marketing and Brands at Potential Energy Coalition
Nicole Dorrler is Global Head of Marketing and Brands at Potential Energy Coalition, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that significantly accelerates climate progress through narrative shifts, data-driven insights, and proven marketing strategies. In her role, Nicole carries out climate change campaigns on various topics, from clean energy to climate disasters, at the moments that matter most, powered by data-driven insights on the best way to frame key issues.
Prior to Potential Energy Coalition, Nicole served as the Deputy Chief Marketing Officer at Truth Initiative, where she produced award-winning, lifesaving, anti-smoking, vaping, and opioid campaigns. During her 16-year run at Truth, she built winning strategies for media, production, social, experiential, analytics, advocacy, data, partnerships, and influencer marketing.
Nicole has more than 25 years of high-level marketing experience for some of the world’s biggest brands. She’s garnered more than 400 awards, and been recognized by the American Marketing Association as 2016 Nonprofit Marketer of the Year, Chief Marketer for the 2018 Future CMO award.
Eric Asche, CEO of Potential Energy Coalition
Eric Asche is the Chief Executive Officer of Potential Energy Coalition, a nonpartisan, nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate the energy transition by driving public demand for solutions. Eric is an Emmy-winning social marketer who has been credited with developing some of the most successful, life-saving public education campaigns in history.
Before joining Potential Energy, Eric served as the chief marketing and strategy officer at Truth Initiative, the organization best known for the anti-smoking Truth campaign whose brand has become ubiquitous in pop culture and was named one of AdAge’s top campaigns of the 21st century. Eric was named a top health influencer by PRWeek and the top CMO for social responsibility by the CMO Club.
Before Truth Initiative, Eric was at GSD&M in Austin, Texas, where he led marketing campaigns for brands like AT&T, Southwest Airlines and Rolling Stone. Prior to that, Eric was part of a business development team at a technology start-up during the dot-com boom, where he led partnership development and fundraising.
Dior Rodriguez, Filmmaker
Dior Rodriguez is an Afro-Caribbean filmmaker from the Dominican Republic who immigrated to the United States at eight. Growing up between Washington Heights and her home island shaped a perspective deeply rooted in both cultures and continues to inform her work.
A graduate of the SUNY Purchase Conservatory with a BFA in Directing, Dior spent several years as an editor before transitioning into directing and now works across commercial and documentary filmmaking.
Her work often centers on the Dominican Republic, exploring its history, culture, and communities through intimate, character-driven stories. Her feature documentary Cachúa explores Carnival traditions through the lens of a small Dominican town, while her current feature, Where the Water Was, follows communities confronting the human and environmental consequences of gold mining. Across both films, she uses deeply local stories to examine larger questions of identity, memory, land, and change.
Cyle Zezo, President and Founder, Reality of Change
Cyle Zezo founded Reality of Change in 2023 to support unscripted producers and studios in their efforts to address sustainability through their work. In 2025, he was named as one of Realscreen’s Factual Under 40 for his work on sustainability in unscripted entertainment. Separately, Zezo has executive produced the series Penn & Teller: Fool Us, Mysteries Decoded and Recipe for Disaster, and was previously the head of Alternative Programming at The CW Network, where he grew unscripted by tripling the size of the unscripted team, shepherded a threefold increase in unscripted programming hours, and led the three key areas of New Series development, Current Series management, and all network Specials (and additionally supported the digital team with original unscripted entertainment). He is on the advisory council for the Hollywood Climate Summit and is an advisor to the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.
Jason Tartick
Jason Tartick is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, finance expert, and host of the hit podcast Trading Secrets, where he pulls back the curtain on what people actually earn, spend, and invest. After a decade in corporate banking, where he executed over 9 figures in lending transactions and earned his MBA in finance and accounting, he made it his mission to strip the shame out of money conversations. He is the author of The Restart Roadmap (HarperCollins, 2022) and Talk Money to Me (HarperCollins, 2024), both built on the belief that financial literacy is a life skill, not a luxury.