Shell Hits the Road with an All-Star Cast in a Low Carbon Challenge

Shell has teamed up Kaley Cuoco to launch a five-part content series that challenges young people to reimagine their everyday journeys if they want to be part of a lower carbon future. Entitled 'The Great Travel Hack,' the series is an integrated digital-first campaign which will be housed on YouTube, targeting a younger audience interested in travel and what the future holds when it comes to ways of moving around.

Kaley will host the first five episodes of 'The Great Travel Hack' series which draws on the universal passion points of travel and adventure and follows two teams of digital content creators, Sara Dietschy and John Hill vs. Joanna Franco and Damon Dominique (better known as ‘Damon and Jo’) – as they battle it out on an epic journey from LA to NYC. The twist? This challenge is not about finishing the fastest – to win, the teams will have to travel coast-to-cast with the lowest CO2 emissions.

The teams are aided along the way by ‘Mission Control’ - a team of experts including Shell scientists and Shell Eco-marathon students monitor the teams’ progress and offer some much-needed advice to help them on their way.

Given that globally, transport makes up nearly 30% of the world’s total energy use. Travelers are increasingly keen to reduce their impact on the environment, and 'The Great Travel Hack' hopes to show the world how you can hit the road, have fun, meet new people – or do business – but sharply reduce your carbon footprint.

Dean Aragon, global VP brand at Shell says: “‘We all need to travel. The big question is can we travel further and faster with lesser emissions? Shell’s ‘The Great Travel Hack’ showcases a wide variety of vehicles (and fuel or energy choices), each tackling the challenge of reducing emissions. There really isn’t one solution, so we need to be open to a range of ideas and innovations.”

The content series has been developed to work across the complete digital ecosystem and in a first for Shell, utilises Dynamic Creative Optimisation. The brand used an enhanced approach to digital targeting, by harnessing and leveraging audience data in entirely new ways for Shell and developed detailed and robust content ecosystems incorporating paid, owned, and earned comms.

Alongside the five episodes, a suite of creative assets including condensed episode formats and behind the scenes teasers have been created to reach the audience across multiple touch points.

The campaign was devised and created by J Walter Thompson who worked with a production team from Carnage Films and a cross agency team from Edelman, VaynerMedia, UEG and Mediacom.

Series one of The Great Travel Hack is available to watch now on youtube.com/shell, before the challenge continues across Europe and Asia over the next year.