Faux Shell Oil Campaign
Arctic Ready was a project commissioned by Greenpeace to raise awareness about Shell Oil's controversial decision to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean. Working with The Yes Men, I built a fake Shell website complete with a satirical HTML5 game and a crowdsourced contest that let visitors generate their own Shell advertisements. The result was users choosing to create thousands of advertisements criticizing Shell's activity in the Arctic.
After noticing many of the ads being shared on Twitter, I created a Twitter bot that pretended to be Shell's PR team. The bot tweeted intelligent responses to anyone who shared an Arctic Ready advertisement. This amplified the discussion and resulted in nearly 4 million page views in less than 48 hours.
Built with Drupal 7, I wrote a custom module to handle the ad contest. The game utilizes the HTML5 canvas element alongside CreateJS to help with sounds and animations.
Relevant links:
Press coverage:
- Shell Oil's Social Media Nightmare Continues, Thanks To Skilled Pranksters, Forbes
- Shell social media oil spill a 'coordinated online assassination', Sydney Herald
- Shell Arctic Ready Hoax Website By Greenpeace Takes Internet By Storm, Huff Post
