Aging oil and gas industry engineer/project manager and environmentalist here. I really like this campaign! It provides an effective counter to the millions (billions?) of dollars the oil and gas industry expends in advertising and lobbying.
In my 25 year experience, the western oil and gas industry is on the balance very responsible when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection. I would much rather have Shell explore the Arctic than say Lukoil.
However, Greenpeace and other environmental activists are good part of the reason why western oil and gas companies are so concerned about the environment. In places where Greenpeace has low influence/support/visibility, things like this are pretty common:
I have dealt with enough pointy haired bosses in my work to realise that without effective activism, health, safety and environment would often be improperly compromised wrt cost, schedule and throughput.
It's very true what you are saying about non-western oil and gas. People forget that the biggest oil spill ever was caused by a totalitarian government on purpose and not by a multinational oil corporation by accident.
In the west, corporate brands make easy targets, but since the companies want to protect their brands it is quite effective at making things better.
I'm still perplexed that Oil companies bother to advertise at all. What's the point? I'd keep a low profile if I were them. People don't really choose where they fill their car on the company do they? It's more dictated by price and whether the station is en route to work.
Good point about Greenpeace keeping the oil companies on their toes. Sad though that it has to be this way.
To me drilling for oil - is almost money for nothing. I'm baffled that these companies aren't behaving more responsibly.
> To me drilling for oil - is almost money for nothing.
You might want to learn about the high costs of exploration and building rigs and wells and all the innovation that has been occurring for decades to extract greater percentages of more kinds of oil out of more kinds of places. Something like gold diggers in the 1800's might have been a lot closer to "almost money for nothing." Maybe even oil back then. But any resource that was easy enough to get for almost nothing has already been used.
BP's deepwater disaster indicates that not enough is being done to protect the environment, it hasn't stopped risky drilling. That should never happen again. Some of those profits could be turned over into environmental preventative protection. These companies smack of pure greed to me.
Exxon made a profit of $41bn on a turnover of $480bn - about an 8% profit margin. That's not really "money for nothing". That's a healthy return on a gargantuan investment.
Some tech stocks profit margins: AAPL: ~30%, MSFT: ~30%, GOOG: ~25%. 3-4 times higher than Exxon. Do those companies all make money for nothing too?
But it would be much lower if these companies were held accountable for the massive environmental impacts that they have (beyond the direct impacts of a spill). Excluding things that are even "debatable" like climate change, pollution and the effects thereof are not. These socialized costs would make oil companies unprofitable.
I agree that oil companies benefit from externalities that aren't accounted for, but I'd really like to see a numerical demonstration that it would make them unprofitable - I'm totally unconvinced that oil demand is that elastic, and I think they'd be able to pass the increased costs on to customers.
Oil is more scarce and useful than money, it's hard to see what would make extraction unprofitable. A carbon tax would mostly disincentive wasteful consumers. I wonder if anything could prevent exploitation of shale gas with a really low EROEI.
Wouldn't another tax on fuel just hurt low-income consumers?
I'm not rich - I drive because I want/need to, not because it's cheap. Sometimes I drive for fun, to get out of town for a bit, and I don't have the most fuel efficient vehicle, so that could be considered wasteful. If gas cost $5,$6,$10/gallon where I live (Chicago) I would still drive. Someone working minimum wage, students, kids, and retirees, increased fuel cost could prevent them from driving altogether.
It will hurt some consumers if they change nothing, but cheap oil is not a right, and being dependent on it now or in the future should be discouraged for good reason (mostly because a lasting ecological catastrophe is worse than diminished standards of living). Some hints that will help commuters save money: better public transport, carpooling, working from home, moving out of suburbia.
There was a good TV program of a tear down of a decommissioned shell/esso rig from the North Sea oil field. On yesterday (Sun 22nd July.)
Apparently there was a shift in European law, that now forces companies to tidy up after they've finished. Brought about after pressure from Greenpeace for Shell trying to ditch the Brent Spar in an underwater trough.
Quite how you'd do this with anything deep sea is beyond me. Worth a watch though.
Re the low profile: regularly paying a large media group for ad space in exchange for no bad publicity would make sense to these companies. Large groups buy unprofitable newspapers for similar reasons.
>It provides an effective counter to the millions (billions?) of dollars the oil and gas industry expends in advertising and lobbying.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. Oil companies continue to exert immense influence over governments because of the taxes they pay and the contributions they make to politicians and their parties. That's meant to be "countered" with mundane jokes on fake twitter profiles and memes on reddit? Forgive me for being cynical. If anything it's a great situation for oil companies. It gives people the illusion they're actually doing something when really it means nothing and the status quo remains.
He's not being sarcastic, I think. I've got a somewhat similar background and I agree with his stated view.
Citizen and consumer activism keeps the bastards (more) honest. One thousand motivated and angry citizens with a plan can act as a very good counterweight to hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing (and lobbying). Really!
Mundane jokes seem trivial, occupation of capped oil wells in the North Sea seem like a bit of a jape. But the effect of these and all the (cute) Greenpeace donation collectors is consciousness-raising and creation of citizens and consumers who ask hard questions, and that scares the politicians no end. It scares Big Oil too and keeps them (more) honest.
The status quo that you speak of is vastly different to that during the 80's and totally alien to the status quo in the 50's, at least in the rich West. Perhaps you've not really noticed the change. I've worked on and off in the oil and gas industry since the 80's and I see a vast, vast change both in the public's attitude, and also in the mentality within the companies themselves.
I'm by no means suggesting that citizen/consumer activism short of violence is useless. In the past the 'Yes Men' and other groups have dragged the 'forgotten' issue of the Bhopal incident back into the news, generated significant bad PR and gotten politicians attention. I just fail to see the value of this particular stunt. Have people learned anything new? I doubt it. Are people writing to their elected officials, organizing petitions or boycotts? Not that I see. It's actionless preaching to the choir - "oil companies are evil" etc.
A lot more people have seen one of these banners via social media than the real Shell advertisements. Some of them will have talked about it. Some more will look at the cute animals and hate Shell. I suspect that Greenpeace will be able to count on some of these people next time a cute fundraiser knocks on their doors...
Here's the thing tho': pranks are fun. Developing alternative energy sources is hard work, and what sponsorship does Greenpeace do in that area? Not much...
That, and not any conspiracy theory, explains everything.
I agree: I don't give money to Greenpeace because they're a marketing organisation that raises cash to do more marketing.
But: there is a school of thought that without broad community support, all the hard work won't add up to much.
They might be partly right, I pay more for "green power" than my neighbours do for "glowing-in-the-dark power", and don't own a car despite how much easier it'd make my life. I guess someone's marketing worked on me...
There are people working on alternative energy. They get less subsidy money from the government than the oil industry, which is plenty profitable on their own. You can re-read that sentence if you didn't believe it the first time.
It takes all kinds. Science and PR to protect the science. The political can be very connected to the scientific when the industry threatened with displacement is very politically active.
I'd be really interested to see a detailed accounting of the oil industry subsidies you refer to. When I've looked into this in the past, all I've been able to find are things like the depreciation of capital assets, which, while it could be considered a subsidy, is not specific to the oil industry. The numbers are very big, but that is because the oil industry makes some of the largest capital investments in industry.
Oil companies don't really pay taxes in the US. Or they do at effectively very low rates, but they are given right back in the form of subsidies. The power they wield is largely through the amount of lobbying and advertising they can do, which means they can destroy the careers of most politicians with a minor opex increase (and that is probably something they can write-off in their taxes, because of other laws they have bought). Essentially it's extortion.
Wow. This is absolutely fascinating. With this campaign, Greenpeace has shown more Internet savvy than the vast majority of professional "viral" marketers.
I'm not going to weigh in on the moral aspects of this incident, as I don't particularly care. I'm far more interested in the mechanics of how this was pulled off, as it has huge implications for corporations, activists, and even political candidates. I could easily see some Obama supporter pulling something similar and creating a firestorm around the Romney campaign.
Love it or hate it, these tactics are here to stay. It will be incumbent upon entities with interests in online perceptions to guard themselves against these kinds of attacks and, should the pros outweigh the cons, engage in them as well.
I was trying to stay fairly clinical about it because it's pretty controversial. But yes, I did have a good giggle when I first saw it on The Yes Men Fix the World.
I have to say I'm laughing, I was completely screwed by a Shell-franchised service station back in 1992 and I have held a grudge since. I never buy Shell gas unless there is no other choice. Formerly I was a loyal customer, if I needed gas I would always go to Shell if I could (since then I've learned that gasoline in any given area pretty much all comes from the same wholesale terminal and it doesn't really matter which station you buy it from).
In the larger sense, lampooning ads is as old as advertising. They are pretty obviously not "real." Not sure why this is news.
What's shocking to me is the blatant manipulation of the mob. Maybe this has gone on forever, but seeing it happen in real time on sites like Reddit is tripping me out. While I think my BS filter is more sophisticated than most, on the morning it was released I sent the Shell party video to a colleague to ask if he was there not realizing it was a spoof. Turns out he happened to know there was no such party.
I feel like the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, and subtly so.
If you are shocked by the "blatant manipulation of the mob", the advertising you see all around you every day, everywhere must put you in a permanent state of catatonia.
How come the combination of internet and activism is suddenly "dangerous", and not the pervasive and misleading propaganda we've been subjected to for generations?
Shell can no longer drown out the opposition with millions of dollars and now it's a problem?
Shell had responded to the challenge that the accepted definition of the phrase "sustainable development" was "development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
Is that definition highly controversial now?
In any event, that certainly does not constitute a massive propaganda campaign against the public.
Depends on which "we" you're talking about. But in the US, these are rarely enforced, and then only against blatant lies that have substantial financial impact.
It's perfectly legal to mislead, confuse, shade, distort, bamboozle, trick, and distract. And you can lie outright if the lie is small. Or if it qualifies as puffery, which basically the kind of lie we have come to expect from people selling stuff.
For example, Shell can say "We care about the environment" and show pictures of frolicking wildlife. They aren't obligated to say, "but we care about profits more" and show some pictures of oil spills.
My favorite example is Airborne, a purported cold preventative that does precisely nothing. They lied in their advertisements for years and made fistfuls of money. After more than a decade somebody finally sued them, and eventually the FTC beat them down as well. The result is that they had to give some of their ill-gotten gains back, and now lie by implication rather than by direct false statements.
But that only happened because a) they were provably wrong, and b) they had enough money for class action lawyers to decide it was worth years of effort to take a whack at their money pinata. As long as your lie isn't provably costing money and provably false, you're basically golden.
Said laws are pretty flexible, I wouldn't rely on them giving you a significant boost of certainty in many products you buy. But apart from actual lies, I believe the intent of the phrase "drown out" is supposed to convey that they can just put so much noise out there it's not feasible for an average Joe who doesn't really care to be able to detect the signal. Noise doesn't have to be false.
I tried googling for some example campaigns, but I couldn't find any examples. I would assume it would almost be impossible to do so in the age of the Internet, reddit, facebook, and twitter. Do you have any examples of Shell drowning out environmentalist groups like Greenpeace?
I didn't mean to imply there actually has been such flooding by Shell, just that it's not about the truth of advertising. I'm a citizen of the internet with AdBlockPlus, but I remind myself that a huge number of people still watch television and read magazines and newspapers. Greenpeace had about $22m in total expenses in 2009 and 2010 each, Shell made $31bn in 2011 profits alone. Is there anything stopping Shell from dropping a few billion on advertising if they wanted to (and convinced the share holders it was a good idea)? They have the money to flood the most popular media outlets, but a top google result highlighting an "aggressive ad campaign" (http://adage.com/article/news/shell-oil-breaks-industry-sile...) suggests they only spend about $15m per year in advertising. When it comes down to it, they probably don't even need to bother. Consumers will get their gas from the lowest-priced gas station they know of. I actually think this action by Greenpeace works in Shell's favor purely due to association when people see the Shell logo as they're driving down a street for gas. I imagine for the common folk Greenpeace hopes to manipulate it produces more of an "oh you" reaction than "I hate you and will never buy from a Shell station!" one, if the image macros are even believed to be official. "Everyone knows" the oil companies are evil (or at least corrupted and in bed with the government).
For the record, this was also a top google result about a 2011 advertised claim being thrown out as misleading. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/19/shell-ads-banned-ov... Not that it says much, I'm sure I can find instances of every multibillion dollar company lying (as well as Greenpeace and PETA).
It's an uneven playing field. In order to play on their pitch (i.e. show TV ads, billboards, magazine ads, etc.) you need to have a lot of money. If you don't have money, you can't get your message across. It's lobsided and unbalanced.
It's about as honest a debate as a soviet election where all other political parties are banned.
What Shell may have done -- namely, claiming jobs creation and downplaying environmental cost -- is something very different than what Greenpeace did here.
Photochopped some ads, hosted them, put up a website, made a fake twitter account. Made fun of a company's brand by pointing out the downplayed environmental cost.
I guess the interesting part to me is that, with the advent of news aggregators and social networks, the internet kind of removes the filter. A blatant lie can take off like wildfire and burn a lot of people before anyone can mobilize to put it out. Maybe I give journalists too much credit, but before the advent of the internet as we know it today, these organizations (whether big oil or Green Peace), had to filter the information through some sort of intermediary first. Now they have direct access to millions of people.
Yeah it's definitely a double-edged sword. Like the person whose house was posted to Craigslist with a "come and take what you want", which people did....and only too late did the owner find out -- and of course, he made no such offers. But the mob was quick to act and didn't ask many questions.
On the brighter side, there's quite a few exposés that we now witness that would have never seen the light of day otherwise (or would have been relegated to B-theaters, flea markets, and mail-order catalogs).
No. Those are pretty orthogonal notions (if you're talking about the idea that you excerpt existing pages that's not really what semantic web means nowadays), and the semantic web remains a terrible idea.
What we need is a more efficient legal process for online statements that cross the line into defamation, and better collaborative filtering (the whole point of sites like reddit is that the truth should out).
Please, no. Don't try to make us feel superior by disparaging the other aggregator. Even if there was a competition, blanket statements on a community would not impress.
I am sorry but a LOT of the big, influential NGOs are very guilty of that and of abusing polemic and demagogy. They seem to think their generally just causes/ideals justify almost all means. Sometimes they are more clever to play their cards right like in this case, sometimes they do a really terrible job and it backfires like when they attacked Apple over the completely made-up energy consumption of a shared hosting facility. But either way they are and always have been consciously using rhetoric means to manipulate people or to at least be heard. This is nothing new - haven't you ever been stopped by them in the streets when they are trying to sign you up for monthly donations? The tactics they are using there are nothing short of slimy car salesmen and ripe with psychological mind-frakks. This is nothing the internet allowed to happen, it has always been there. But the "good old days" when mostly techs were using the web and when the general signal-to-noise-ratio was better are over.
For me, this just makes Greenpeace look bad. I wonder when we will see an "online assassination assassination": a purposely concocted lie that looks like it is spread by another party, designed to "backfire".
I dislike Greenpeace with a fervour shared with few other groups.
They constantly try and damage companies, which has a very real flow-on effect on peoples livelihoods. Usually their campaigns are built on a base of lies and usually over something the target company has very little control over anyway.
The damage they do to legitimate environmental concerns with their jack-assery is untold. In truth they are just a corporate machine built to collect more donations.
I go out and pick up rubbish, help monitor local wildlife and generally try and help out. This afternoon I told off a pair of kids trying to destroy a tree for kicks and made sure they didn't come back.
The only people I meet from Greenpeace are very unpleasant and a Greenpeace shirt never appears at local cleanups and volunteer days.
Honestly, I think the jury is back on Greenpeace. Either you already think they look bad, or you are a fan of their work. I don't imagine many people are going to be forming new opinions on them in 2012.
I expect this sort of action from The Yes Men, as they are 'culture jamming' activists and this is their modus operandi. Considering the levels of influence multinational corporations such as Shell have on our world and on leading world governments I don't have an issue with a little impersonation to draw attention to issues such as these.
I do have an issue with a charity doing this. Funds donated by Greenpeace supporters will have gone towards creating this assassination. IMO that's not justified.
As funny as these spoofed ads are, isn't this exactly the sort of thing that libel laws are for? This is a fake site purporting to be, in fact, an official Shell site. I guess their domain name isn't hosted by GoDaddy otherwise the URL would probably already have been redirected to shell.com.
Yes, in theory this is against the law and Shell could sue them. However, that might not be a good PR move. Greenpeace might fight back, they could go to trial, try to get documents, make claims about "Shell trying to censor talk about their artic drilling" etc.
Shell hope this will all just blow over. Litagation will not help it blow over.
These guys engage in actual naval combat on the high seas. I don't think they're afraid of lawsuits. If I were a lawyer, I wouldn't go anywhere near either side of that battle anyway.
The vandalism by the local chapter this year has been hilariously misguided. They destroyed a GM crop experiment that was investigating the damage GM crops do, attacked a building they thought processed cage chickens but actually cut off the supply of free range eggs and destroyed fences that were protecting reintroduced native animals from predators in protest against culling kangaroos.
At the end of the day that's why I'm perfectly happy with Greenpeace/etc doing their battling from the web. They get the ego rub they desperately desire and no fingers are brought close to dangerous machinery.
In theory, yes, Shell could sue. But it'd generate more PR and more negative attention. Shell want it to blow over. Litagation will not make it blow over.
a) If a tree falls in a forest?
b) Congressional hearings, a revitalization of public interest in conservation, and Shell would be dealing with the fallout for decades.
The article all but suggests that Shell actually do this. While part of me thinks Shell doing its own satire / misinformation campaign would be the most effective response (legal action would just attract more attention), I have a hard time imagining such misinformation campaign having anything but further negative effect on Shell's public branding.
The journalist let social media brand consultants write about half of the article, of course they would suggest escalating. Shell raising public awareness of shills would be an awesome move.
This is stunt brilliant, but the truth of the matter is its not going to solve any problems. Don't get me wrong, I love that Shell oil is getting clowned, but other than possibly choosing a different brand of gas its not going to infect any meaningful human behavioral change.
As long as people live in a world where you have to turn on an engine to do ANYTHING - and participate in an economy that depends on and encourages over consumption, oil companies will continue to thrive. Humans will continue to burn shit to live the dream and humanity will carry on its march towards extinction.
Someone needs to find a way to convince people that using an automobile (or multiple automobiles) as a replacement for their legs is the real problem.
There's obvious parody (which the original campaign kind of skirts at the edge of), and there's outright impersonation.
A reasonable person should be able to tell the roast from the real deal - the original website was at the very edge of it, the Twitter account is right off the cliff.
I'm only using Ghostery, I wouldn't expect that to affect the main content of a site.
Ghostery's blocked list:
DoubleClick
Facebook Connect
Google +1
Google Adsense
Google Analytics
LinkedIn Widgets
NetRatings SiteCensus
ScoreCard Research Beacon
Twitter Button
Tynt Insight
... just disabled Ghostery, and one of those is affecting the article content.
My guess is that Ghostery considers the javascript that is served by Twitter to be a tracking device (quite possibly correctly)... but I could be wrong.
I just wonder why they targeted Shell with this new tactic, and not Exxon, the biggest oil company - is Exxon's environmental protection record better thank Shell's?
In my 25 year experience, the western oil and gas industry is on the balance very responsible when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection. I would much rather have Shell explore the Arctic than say Lukoil.
However, Greenpeace and other environmental activists are good part of the reason why western oil and gas companies are so concerned about the environment. In places where Greenpeace has low influence/support/visibility, things like this are pretty common:
http://www.tropix.co.uk/region_files/azerbajn_03.htm
I have dealt with enough pointy haired bosses in my work to realise that without effective activism, health, safety and environment would often be improperly compromised wrt cost, schedule and throughput.