British inventor Colin Furze, who has 12.5 million followers on YouTube, has also worked with Shell on its social media output. In a campaign produced for the fossil fuel giant by advertising agency EssenceMediacom, Furze co-hosted a six week virtual competition “challenging students to solve real life energy challenges”.
The campaign was co-hosted by US-based science influencer Astronaut Abby and won World Media Group’s 2021 Corporate Influencer Award. According to the award submission, the competition generated 127 million views and nearly one billion impressions, with EssenceMediacom boasting that Shell-branded content “actually outperformed Colin [Furze’s] own organic content benchmarks, achieving 59 percent more interactions than the norm for posts on Colin’s owned channels”.
NOT COLIN FURZE
@silence7 I am increasingly convinced that the goal of large oil companies is not to make money, but instead to cause maximal harm to as many people as possible.
@ceo_of_monoeye_dating @silence7
Rather that they have all the money they could ever need already, so now they work towards power and control. Same as with most mega corporations, they’ve gotten so big that the rules of the market are different for them. It’s like with Alphabet pumping absurd amounts of money into YouTube, it’s not about making their money back, it’s about gaining the monopoly on video content and exercising control over you. These energy companies don’t have such an easy way to start influencing people as tech companies though, who can just start censoring and promoting whatever they will.
