The Great Travel Hack

Created for and paid for by British petroleum giant Shell plc and made by advertising company J Walter Thompson London, this was by JWT's own admission an advertising campaign, although in public it was presented as being a TV series.

The campaign was widely pilloried for being a green-washing exercise which attempted to shift the blame and responsibility for climate change from the petroleum companies to individuals. Dutch comedian Arjen Lubach devoted a 7.5-minute segment on his satirical news show Zondag met Lubach (2014) to the topic. So, too, did German YouTube channel Simplicissimus' English-language show, Reasy.

The UK's Independent newspaper, meanwhile, called it "a little like a tobacco company getting two teams of cancer patients to see who can chuff their way through a duty free pack of 'low-tar' cigarettes the fastest". And Marketing Week's Mark Ritson disparaged it as being "...shameful. Repeat after me, S-H-A-M-E-F-U-L."

After the campaign's poor reception, Shell had scrubbed the YouTube series from its channel by mid-2022.