The Great Online Shell Hoax

O

ne of the great things about online hoaxes is that they never seem to go away. It doesn’t matter if an online hoax gets exposed; snopes.com can feature it, and news sites can explain it, but as long as there are people who are seeing it for the first time, it can always go viral again and again. Such is the case with the hoax perpetrated by environmental activist group Greenpeace that targeted Shell Oil.

The campaign started with a website, ArcticReady.com, which was designed to look like a Shell-sponsored site. The site itself is a clever bit of satire, in which the company appearing to be Shell talks about the opportunities opened up as a result of climate change. “We at Shell are committed to not only recognize the challenges that climate change brings, but to take advantage of its tremendous opportunities. And what's the biggest opportunity we've got today? The melting Arctic.”

The viral hoax begun on the website involved “Shell” attempting to crowdsource its marketing for drilling in the Arctic. The site asked users to take some premade backgrounds and come up with ads featuring their own slogans to help popularize the idea of drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Then it showed examples that users had supposedly come up with, which showed their campaign backfiring horribly. 

These ads soon appeared on Facebook and Twitter often accompanied by a story about how Shell had effed up royally. A typical one showed a white fox with the caption, “You can’t run your SUV on ‘cute.’”

After about a week, Greenpeace claimed ownership of the website and admitted to authoring the fake ads. And thus the viral campaign petered out, for a while at least. 

Then this week, a fake Shell PR Twitter account, @ShellisPrepared appeared, asking Twitter users to stop sharing the ads and claiming that they were “a bit embarrassed,” and threatening legal action, claiming libel.

Naturally, this got people sharing the ads again, and since not everyone knew of the initial debunking, the story of Shell’s bungled marketing strategy lived to go viral another day.