Oil giant BP desperately attempted to win over Americans in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. To that end, the company spent and spent $93,429,175 on commercials and other PR-related advertisements. Should they have saved their money?
As popular anger and resentment grew in the six weeks after the BP oil spill, then-CEO Tony Hayward trotted out in front of a television crew to tape a national commercial.
“BP has taken full responsibility for cleaning up the spill in the Gulf,” a disingenuous Hayward proclaimed. “We know it is our responsibility to keep you informed… We will get this done. We will make this right.”
That advert was played across the nation, and with disastrous results: Americans saw right through Hayward’s transparent and patronizing attempt to clean up the company’s image.
It soon became clear to executives that Hayward wasn’t the man for the PR job, so they replaced him with Darryl Willis, a middle-ranking BP employee and Gulf resident who, like Hayward, attempted to assure the American public that BP would do what it could to rectify its mistake. Willis too was ridiculed.
The commercials as a whole were an utter failure: BP’s public approval ratings were in the gutter at 15%, Hayward was unceremoniously fired, to be replaced by American Robert Dudley as CEO, another expensive publicity stunt, to be sure, and poor Willis saw himself upstaged by a rotating, yet still unconvincing, cast of BP employees and concerned citizens.
In total, BP spent about $94 million on ads in the months between April and July of this year, according to a House Energy and Commerce Committee report. That’s triple the amount they spent in the same period last year. BP claims it simply wanted to keep the public informed, and pointed out that they ran more national ads this year than lost, which bumped up the cost. Still, Americans are not buying BP’s expensive PR efforts.
“It feels like BP is overdoing it,” said Rep. Kathy Castor, Democrat from Florida, about BP’s ad spending. “It’s really making people angry. Every day you get up and see these full-page ads in every newspaper and the TV ads. It’s really ticking people off.” Castor continued, “While BP certainly has the right to advertise, its approach has been insensitive to the taxpayers and business owners.”
BP’s approval rating has bounced back a bit—up to 33%, according to an AP poll from last month—but the company still has a long way to go in making up what it’s lost. Our coast line has an even more arduous road to trudge, and the damage done costs far more than $94 million.
Sure, BP spent $3 billion on the cleanup, but there’s still a mess to be cleaned up, and this excessive waste of PR money would have been better spent in the Gulf, rather than on the airwaves.
BP just learned the “you can’t buy happiness” proverb the hard way. It’s nice to know, however, that the United States can’t be bought with $94 million.
What kind of cheap broad do you think we are, BP?
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anon
