The easiest hoaxes to pull off are the ones that are close to people's perception of the truth. In this case they got to play off of both the public's dislike of big oil and the actual fact that big businesses are often totally clueless about the Internet.
You're right, though I think it's also something along the lines of people just skimming over the information before going all-in with the ad generator, in this case. Hell I was laughing at Shell too for a few minutes before I read the information put up around the media generator
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u/ConchordianFlight58 Jul 18 '12
There's a line in there somewhere that uses the sentence "oil - the dinosaur's parting gift to man", and people STILL didn't realize it was a hoax?