Headline: Short film is central to $100m campaign
March 02, 2007
Steve Hawkes
Shell is spending an estimated $100 million (£55 million) on a global advertising campaign built around a film shot by the director of The Last King of Scotland that is nine minutes long, The Times has learnt.
The film, commissioned from Kevin Macdonald last year, will be shown in cinemas in Britain, Europe, the United States and China and backed by Shell’s biggest online advertising blitz.
Nearly 15 per cent of its budget in its main five markets, including the UK, is being spent on the web in a move that will raise new concerns about the health of traditional advertising platforms.
Shell will use 20-second “teasers” on television to direct viewers to its website, where they will be able to watch the film and play interactive games. It also plans a series of adverts in the press.
The “Real Energy Solutions” campaign is the latest attempt by Jeroen van der Veer, Shell’s chief executive, to position the Anglo-Dutch oil giant as the best among its peers for technological innovation.
Three years on from the scandal when Shell was forced to admit that it had overstated the amount of proven reserves on its books, Mr Van der Veer aims to convince governments and the environmental lobby that Shell is the company to back as the industry looks for oil and gas in more remote and testing areas.
Mr Macdonald’s film Eureka is based on a true story in which a Shell engineer realised how to connect and recover oil and gas from 100 neighbouring reservoirs in Brunei after seeing his son turn a bendy straw upside down to reach the bottom of a milkshake.
The “snake well” technique was introduced at the Champion West field in 2001, enabling the group to tap reserves discovered 26 years before.
Ad nauseam
Shell’s UK advertising breakdown
50%
television
25%
newspapers
13%
online
12%
cinema
Source: Shell
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article1459142.ece
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