Greenpeace’s latest attack on the company’s Arctic drilling is a little too effective.
The centerpiece of the site is a fake ad generator that lets people add their own captions to photos of the Arctic (the ad generator appears to be down now). You can see the gallery here. The captions that people have added are harsh, and sometimes hilarious. Here are some examples:
- Birds are like sponges… for oil!
- We’d drill a crippled orphan’s spine if there was some oil in it.
- Because you can’t afford to visit pristine wilderness anyway.
- End polar bear attacks in our lifetime.
- This fox will murder you unless we kill it first.
- Because your gas should come from someplace beautiful.
Shell clearly wants all of this to go away — so much so that it said it won’t take legal action against Greenpeace. The company is looking to launch its first offshore Arctic drilling in two decades, and continues to be hammered by environmental groups as a result
Greenpeace also used Twitter to help its site go viral, creating a fake Shell account that pretended to be panicking as user ads were created. “Our team is working overtime to remove inappropriate ads,” tweeted the @ShellisPrepared account. “Please stop sharing them.”
That only got more attention as people fell for the joke.
Are we seeing a new era in corporate protests? The Occupy Wall Street movement effectively used social media and the Internet to spread its message, and Greenpeace has taken the idea a step further with its elaborate viral joke.
Who’s next?