"Unique People. Powerful Together"
Released across the breadth of their online presences, and in promotion of International Women’s Day, Shell invites us to sit down with Vice President Aparajita and uncover some of her own personal history that goes into developing the brands’ public identity.
The fact that Shell chooses to consistently pursue, and have come to excel at, these types of shorts speak to the successful long-term strategy the company has adopted: listening, reflecting, and retelling the stories of those who join the business often having overcome the most obstacles after beginning with the least advantage.
The backward looking, memory laden, direct approach in this piece is one that many brands adopt believing it to be low hanging, cost effective PR fruit. But in reality, few are able to get it right. And the ones that do are, for the most part, unable to match Shell’s deft touch. With over 2K likes on LinkedIn and placing in the top 5 of Moving Image’s weekly Benchmark rankings, audiences agree.
Listening to the story of Aps collective shunning by her family (and village) as a young, single mother, we find ourselves taking on her burdens in the first act of this mini epic. The informal, conversational styles, interspersed with archival footage recruit our empathy and focus. The result is that we care, and therefore we’re tied more strongly to both her messages and the brand.
At just over 3 minutes, this piece matches those other editions released by Shell in recent years, also usually around this time of year. But even as we revisit this genre, it never feels repetitive. Rather the opposite. Framing Ap as the centre of the room, surrounded by her books and posters, her life from scratch, she’s given a visual gravity. And it isn’t long into the run-time that her story pulls us in.
