YPF and Shell ran 'beat up the community manager' gas-station ads — Argentina revolted

In September 2025, gas stations under Argentina's two largest fuel brands, YPF and Shell, each posted a video built on a social-media trend where a company's 'community manager' shows up in person and staff treat her as an unwelcome nuisance. Versions of the format had circulated for years in the US, Europe and Asia as mild, deadpan avoidance humor.

In its Latin American adaptation, first seen in Mexico and Colombia, the joke had already escalated to depicting the community manager as physically removed. The Shell station in Crespo, Entre Ríos, and a separate YPF station both went further: staff were shown covering the woman with a bag, hitting her with a traffic cone, and loading her into a vehicle to be driven away.

The videos drew immediate condemnation from politicians and women's-rights groups, who called them an endorsement of violence against women dressed up as workplace comedy. Raízen, Shell's Argentine licensee, issued a statement rejecting 'all forms of violence and discrimination' and repudiating the video from its franchisee's account. The freelance marketer who had produced and starred in the Shell video said on the record that she had conceived and produced it herself and that she understood, as a woman, why the message had been read differently than intended.

Both companies moved to distance themselves from the content within days, but neither incident was an isolated slip: the same violent-kidnapping variant of the format had already spread across multiple Latin American brands' social accounts before YPF's and Shell's licensees each picked it up independently.