Shell Ludicrous Analogies

I worked at Vayner Media on a social media campaign for Shell as part of the ‘Make the Future’ campaign. The brief was to reach out to a younger, more socially engaged audience to talk about some of the alternative energies Shell is investing in.

We made three short videos covering Hydrogen, Electricity and LNG fuels. These are obviously quite weighty subjects but the films were designed for Instagram and Youtube where they’d be fighting for attention with more ‘fun’ content like cat videos and Kylie Jenner. We therefore tried to make them as irreverent and entertaining as possible - writing in the ‘language of the Internet’.

The concept was to explain the technology behind each of these fuels using really silly and slightly tortured analogies. We collaborated with Aardman Animations (the studio behind Wallace and Grommit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run) to bring them to life.

Once the films launched we followed up with a social campaign designed to provoke discussion and debate around the thorny topic of big energy companies and sustainability. Mostly that just provoked a load of (justifiably) angry tweets. But we did get a nice reply from Elon Musk.

Agency: Vayner Media London
CD: Ryan Murphy
Creatives: Gate Lambert, Dan Fryer & Me
Animation House: Aardman Animations

The films ran on YouTube, Instagram Stories and on Twitter where they attracted the attention of Elon Musk!