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You often hear that mimicry is the greatest form of flattery – well, if you asked Shell these days, we’re guessing they wouldn’t necessarily agree. The reason for this is why Arctic Ready, a joint campaign between Greenpeace and The Yes Men, is this this week’s featured Campaign We Love.

Back in May 2012 a website called Arctic Ready launched. Everything about the site, down to the “About” section seemed to indicate that the site was the product of an eager, misguided, new project from Shell. As you delved deeper into it, you’d find a kids game parody (“Angry Bergs”) and an ad generator (“Let’s Go! Social”), some instructional Oil Spill clean-up videos and more.

Click to read more about this campaign we love!

Other aspects to the campaign included viral videos like this one, purporting to show footage from a private launch party for Shell.

And now they’ve followed it up with a Twitter feed that acts as nervous as Shell probably is with regards to this coordinated campaign which has been described as both a “nightmare” and a “coordinated online assassination.”

So why do we love this campaign?

Teamwork.Greenpeace, The Yes Men, and the Occupy supporters who have helped them are all capable of running this type of campaign on their own – however through their coordination they’ve created something truly unique and compelling. Greenpeace is prominently featuring an attack on Shell on their main page – but it isn’t the Arctice Ready one. Finding other organizations that support your same cause doesn’t mean you have to lose sight of your own angle – more often than not it just means more coverage of your target issues.

High Social Media Integration. The ad generator on the Arctic Ready page allows you share what you create as well as ads that others have created. Once you share it on your Twitter account you are likely to get @ mentioned by the Shell Is Prepared Twitter handle asking you to please not share the ads. Using social media is one thing – but engaging on it is where the real action is – if you are going to go social on a coordinated campaign – make sure you’ve got the people behind it to respond regularly.

Keeping Up The Charade. There isn’t always a replicable formula to make something go viral – but if you are going the pretend to be somebody else route – you’ve got to make it authentic. As we discussed in last week’s post timing is crucial – but so is the voice. Even if you aren’t running an elaborate ruse – you’ve got to have a genuine voice for all of your communications – and your whole campaign.

What do you love about this campaign? Share your thoughts with us below and join the conversation!