Proprietary and secondary research showed us that peer to peer voices and real life events held more sway with this audience than traditional advertising.

We understood that:

The audience liked learning – GWI data showed that more millennials wanted brands to ‘help them improve their knowledge’ than to entertain them.

A range of evidence was important to drive brand reappraisal.

There was a latent unease around ‘energy’; the topic felt too distant and complex to engage with.

The audience engaged when they saw a positive impact on people’s lives.

With this in mind, there was no traditional ‘creative idea’ at the heart of the campaign.

Rather than writing a media plan, we assembled the Shell Influencer Collective; a wide range of relevant voices who would speak on our audiences level, getting them talking to each other about Shell’s bright energy ideas and the positive impact on people in the real world.

The Influencer Collective included:

Ultra-relevant vloggers; energy “YouTubers” don’t exist as such, so we used social, search and content data to uncover scaled, authentic ‘pop science’ vloggers. These vloggers would tell Shell’s stories connecting directly with their Millennial followers – they included Smarter Every Day (US/UK), Manual do Mundo and Nerdologia (Brazil).

Now This News, a social-only news publisher, who developed simple, accessible, shareable, newsfeed-worthy shortform videos across a range of energy topics.

Pan-regional publishers including Wired, Mashable and National Geographic, who created global native content programmes with deeper narratives around key stories.

The breadth and range of our stories was important; working with our partners, we created 73 specific pieces of video and editorial, covering initiatives from Gravity Lights, to BioBeans, to kinetic football pitches, all supported by a dedicated Shell #makethefuture site, enabling the audience to go broader and deeper into every story.

In total, Shell’s #makethefuture content reached over 200 million people, with our videos achieving 113 million views on social platforms alone. Of this, over 22 million people were reached without any paid support.

Our range of ‘bright energy ideas in action’ videos were viewed for a total of 16,293,600 minutes.

That’s 31 years.

Social listening data during the campaign showed Shell mentioned in almost 3x as many conversations regarding innovation and technology compared to their nearest direct competitor (BP), with positive mentions outnumbering negatives by a ratio of 3 to 1.

Incredibly, Shell were mentioned in more innovation conversations in the period than GE Energy, Google Energy, and IBM combined.

Positive comments on Shell’s influencer content outweighed negative comments by a ratio of 4 to 1, and advocate voices were raised to defy cynics