Greenpeace today announced its intention to put kids at the heart of its ongoing campaign for LEGO to end its co-promotion with Shell, as it revealed its second video, which stars three young children. The video is accompanied by a global competition asking LEGO fans to build something out of LEGO which will help save the Arctic from Shell.
The video, made by UK creative agency PGA, is designed to appeal to children and parents. In it, three children describe an imaginary day out in the Arctic including riding a polar bear and sledding down a glacier. At one point an Antarctic penguin makes an unexpected appearance. The children’s imaginings are brought to life in LEGO using CGI graphics.
The three girls, Robin Gilbert, age six, Chen Mingzhu, age seven and Florencia Simms, age seven, speak English, Mandarin and Spanish respectively. These are the three most spoken languages in the world.
Watch the video ‘LEGO: Help children save the Arctic’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci4I-VK9jew
Sara Ayech, Arctic campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “LEGO’s promotional deal with Shell is really damaging, because it helps Shell pretend it’s a caring, family friendly company. In reality, it’s not. Shell wants to drill in the Arctic. But a spill there would be impossible to clean up and the only reason they can even drill in the Arctic is because climate change is melting the ice. That’s something that threatens all kids around the world.”
“Children and parents are LEGO’s core customer base, and the fate of the Arctic is important to them. We’re hoping this video and competition will inspire a whirlwind of creativity and action among young LEGO fans that LEGO just won’t be able to ignore.”
More than 700,000 people have already signed a petition urging LEGO to end its deal with Shell. Greenpeace attempted to deliver the petition to LEGO twice, and both times LEGO refused to accept it.
Since 2012, Shell’s Arctic programme has suffered a series of dangerous incidents and setbacks. The company was fined by the US government for twice breaking air pollution rules in the Arctic, it grounded a drilling rig on the Alaskan coast, and has come under fire from both the US Coastguard and senior administration officials.
In that same period 16 million [1] Shell-branded LEGO sets were sold or given away at petrol stations in 33 countries [2], making it one of the largest promotional lines LEGO has ever produced [3].
The first campaign video, ‘LEGO: Everything is Not Awesome’ was released on 8 July 2014, and has been watched over five million times so far.
Ends/
Notes to editors:
Stills from the video and photos of the three children who narrate it are available.
See the
petition page for the campaign for Lego to drop Shell at:
www.legoblockshell.org
Read more:
LEGO is
keeping bad company: no more playdates with Shell
Media briefing on Shell’s threat to the Arctic
End notes:
[1] Shell
Lego Vimeo, Iris Worldwide, 2013
[2] Information provided by Shell to the Mirror
on 9 July 2014
[3] Shell
Lego Vimeo, Iris Worldwide, 2013
