She'll

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Overview

She'll refers to an advertising campaign by the oil company Royal Dutch Shell, better known as "Shell," done to celebrate International Women's Day on Sunday, March 8th, 2020. The campaign saw the company changing the name of participating gas stations to "She'll," a reference to the contraction of "She Will." Many online, however, criticized the campaign as an empty gesture.

Background

International Women's Day was first held on February 10th, 1910 by the Socialist Party of America.

On March 6th, 2020, a video advertisement announcing the campaign went viral on Twitter (shown below).

wait for it.. pic.twitter.com/t3PlPj9v6j

— wheels (@wheelswordsmith) March 6, 2020

Developments

Online Reaction

Online, the advertisement was met with criticism. Twitter^[1] user @elenapodge tweeted, "woke capitalism is a JOKE & the people involved in these marketing ploys are evil," echoing the sentiment of others who were not pleased with the campaign (tweet shown below, left).

Meanwhile, others were unsure as to whether or not the post was a parody. The comedy account @theyesmen tweeted that they were behind the prank, but this was quickly disproven (shown below, center and right).^[2]^[3]

@elenapodge woke capitalism is a JOKE & the people involved in these marketing ploys are evil Shell Shell to Become She'll for International Women's Day The name change is part of the She Will initiative, which highlights the company's dedication to a gender balanced . S csnews.com 0 Shell 3:31 PM · Mar 6, 2020 from Texas, USA · Twitter for iPhone

Media Coverage

Several media outlets covered the campaign, including AdWeek,^[4] CBS,^[5] Daily Dot ^[6] and more. Jacobin^[7] magazine criticized the campaign. They wrote, "The rebranding isn’t exactly breaking new ground for international oil companies like She’ll, SHEvron, EXXonMobil, or Saudi HERamco -- which regularly break literal ground on new oil and gas extraction despite it being plainly out of step with millions of people’s collective hope for a habitable future. After its Deepwater Horizon spill killed eleven people in 2010, BP briefly rebranded as “Beyond Petroleum” before switching back to its original name amid criticism and divesting heavily from renewables."

On March 9th, VICE^[8] published an article about visiting a "She'll" station (picture below). They wrote, "It was a relief to confirm that the She'll was real and not some collective hallucination of Twitter users. It was also nice to know that at least one She'll employee seemed to be happy with it, since it's unlikely anyone else will really figure out what's going on."