Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley [Full disclosure: this author worked at Shell International in 1996 and 97]

The Arctic Ready website is an especially well-designed spoof. The hotlinks promise connections to Shell.Com, but actually take the reader to other parts of the Arctic Ready site. But to take things a full circle, Arctic Ready has its own spoof Twitter feed, @ShellisPrepared, which is threatening action to clamp down on the spoof website. Both the Guardian and Huffington Post are reporting that the site has been produced by Greenpeace. The wit, the detail and the level of social media engagement certainly imply this. 

From nothing, the site jumped to massive social media engagement in two days (16-18 July).

A great many people are falling for the spoofs. Some people think that the Arctic Ready site was a genuine effort by Shell at social media engagement which was then hijacked by activists. Not so. While it invites people to create ads for Shell and the tone of the copy mimics a multi-national, the content is pure parody. It presents a multi-national as left-leaning activists tend to imagine that it is.

Others recognise that the site is parody, but think that the tweets threatening legal action against the site and people who retweet them are real. Wrong again, they are also from Arctic Ready. This is a simply brilliant development in social media management. While some major social media fails have come from multi-nationals threatening legal action against activists, these activists didn't wait for Shell to make that error. They closed the circle by pretending to threaten themselves, and also threatening Twitter users, knowing that this would anger them. Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

Greenpeace – if it be they – has exceeded its own campaigns against BP here. The competition to choose a new logo for BP was good, and this recycles the idea. But the BP campaign was expressly run on Greenpeace's website, not on a clever spoof site. The addition of the threat of leal action is phenomenal.