"Let's Go! Arctic" — Polar bear on melting iceberg with fake Shell ad text: 'Icecaps shmicecaps. Let's go.'

"Let's Go! Arctic"

2012viral videoclassic

Published September 5, 2026

"Let's Go! Arctic" was a June 2012 hoax marketing campaign staged by Greenpeace and The Yes Men that impersonated Shell Oil Company to protest Arctic drilling. The centerpiece was a faked "epic PR FAIL" video from a Space Needle party where a model oil rig sprayed liquid on an elderly woman, which fooled tech blogs and Reddit before the pranksters revealed themselves and rolled out a full satirical corporate website that spawned thousands of user-made anti-drilling image macros.

hoax memes protest memes culture jamming memes prank memes 2012 memes

Overview

"Let's Go! Arctic" was a coordinated culture-jamming stunt built out of three layers, a faked leaked party video, a parody corporate site at ArcticReady.com, and a fake Shell press release threatening journalists who covered it3. Each piece was designed to bait shares before the reveal, so the joke would already be halfway around the internet by the time anyone got around to fact-checking it1.

The hoax leaned on the visual grammar of a real corporate leak, shaky phone footage, a bystander who films past a security goon trying to grab the camera, and a slow-motion mishap involving rich attendees getting soaked2. That look was convincing enough that outlets like Gizmodo initially covered the clip straight before adding update notes admitting it was probably staged2. The ArcticReady.com site went further and cloned Shell's tone with a caption generator that let visitors slap sarcastic slogans over stock photos of polar bears and rigs, effectively crowdsourcing anti-drilling image macros under Shell's own branding3.

The fourth layer, and the one that gave the campaign a second news cycle, was a fake legal-threat letter mailed to journalists on Shell letterhead by a shell PR firm called "Wainwright and Shore"5. It warned reporters against publishing the #shellfail hashtag, which of course guaranteed more reporters would5.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (origin) / Reddit + Twitter (viral spread)
Creator
Greenpeace and The Yes Lab
Date
2012

On June 7, 2012, YouTube account kstr3l uploaded a one-minute clip titled "#ShellFAIL: Private Arctic Launch Party Goes Wrong," which claimed to show a private Shell Oil farewell party for its Arctic-bound rigs at the top of Seattle's Space Needle1. In the video an oil-rig-shaped model that was meant to pour drinks malfunctions and sprays liquid straight into the face of an elderly woman, followed by awkward silence and a Shell staffer trying to confiscate the filmer's phone2. The video was actually shot by Occupy "infiltrator" Logan Price, and the drenched "widow of the rig designer" was 84-year-old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey, already well known for being pepper-sprayed by Seattle Police during Occupy protests the previous fall3.

The stunt was organized by Greenpeace, The Yes Lab, and members of the Occupy movement, with Greenpeace's James Turner posing as an advertising executive at the fake event3. The next day, June 8, The Yes Men's Matthew Martell uploaded a follow-up YouTube video titled "#ShellFAIL – Viral Campaigners Revealed" that explained the whole thing as a coordinated hoax to raise awareness of Shell's Arctic drilling program1.

How It Spread

The clip took off almost immediately. Redditor loonytoad submitted it to Reddit on June 8 and it hit the site's front page, while news blogs, topical outlets, and Occupy-linked Twitter accounts pushed the #shellFAIL hashtag through the day1. Huffington Post reported the video reached the #1 spot on Reddit and #2 on YouTube with roughly half a million views inside 24 hours3. Gizmodo's write-up ran with the party-disaster framing before appending update notes pointing to Gawker's post identifying it as a hoax2. KYM tallied more than 500,000 views, over 1,000 YouTube comments and thousands of tweets by early morning June 8, climbing past 718,000 views by June 201.

The same day the video peaked, the pranksters rolled out ArcticReady.com as a fake Shell social-media hub with a caption generator, an image gallery, and copy written in a corporate-cheerful voice praising Arctic drilling3. Users flooded it with sarcastic anti-drilling macros, and by June 20 more than 8,800 image submissions had been uploaded, with the top-rated entries all mocking the drilling program1. On June 12 the site added a Flash parody game called "Angry Bergs," an Angry Birds clone tucked into a "Just for Kids" page1.

Then came the fake legal threat. A PR agency called Wainwright and Shore emailed journalists a statement claiming Shell's lawyers were considering formal action against "unknown activists" behind the counterfeit campaign, warning reporters away from the #shellfail hashtag5. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow called the number, confirmed the email had been sent on Shell's behalf, and posted the full text, only for it to turn out that Wainwright and Shore had registered its domain only a month earlier and had almost no Google footprint outside an Eventbrite listing for the fake Shell event5. The Yes Lab later took credit for the letter, and Royal Dutch Shell formally denied any involvement in either the Space Needle event or the legal threats4.

How to Use This Meme

"Let's Go! Arctic" is more of a case study than a reusable format, but the ArcticReady.com caption generator did produce a template that briefly caught on: a corporate-style photo of Arctic wildlife, a rig, or the Titanic, overlaid with cheerful ad copy that undercuts itself ("Let's Go!" as the tagline, with a punchline about spills, extinction, or drilling)1. Users typically paired a wholesome stock image with a darkly ironic slogan in Shell's brand voice, which is why observers spotted the hoax quickly, real Shell stock libraries do not include the Titanic4.

Frequently Asked Questions