Remembering back when BP was green, like its ads said
Don Pittis | CBC News | Posted: June 2, 2010 10:38 PM | Last Updated: June 2, 2010
Just over a month ago, many people probably thought of BP as the greenest oil company on Earth.
Not you and me, of course, because we aren't influenced by advertising. But everyone else.
Sure, we knew BP was an oil company and we all know oil companies aren't saints when it comes to the environment.
But after a decade-long advertising campaign, most of us could be forgiven for thinking BP was just a little different.
Heck, their logo was a bright green and yellow sunflower.
What's more, according to the BP message, while oil might be a necessary evil just now, it's not the future.
Remember, this is no longer British Petroleum we are talking about. It is now "Beyond Petroleum."
Greenwashing
Through the magic of the internet you don't have to imagine that wave of green branding information that was unleashed from corporate headquarters.
You can enjoy it right now at the comfort of your own computer and with a quick visit to YouTube.
There's the one on "creating clean energy."
There is the ad with the cute babies driving through fields of wind turbines, avoiding all the nasty gas stations and ending up guess where?
And then there is the one with all the innocent customers asking BP to solve their environmental problems.
Of course now it all feels like a horrible joke. The cuteness. The windmills. The saccharine sincerity. The pretty green logo.
And, as we watch the live-action BP-cam at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico spewing thousands of barrels of crude a day, we realize the joke was on us.
A certain selectivity
What we have here is just one of the dangers of corporate image advertising.
It is common in glossy magazines.
Construction companies are "building for the future." Logging companies, back when they had money, were "planting Canada's forests of tomorrow."
Usually, these kinds of ads are at least partially true. They always take the bright side, but that is not unique in the world of advertising.
As I combed through the glossy GE dishwasher ad that came in today's paper, I can find no mention of the fact that dishwashers will add to your energy bill and periodically break down and cause you a lot of bother.
But this selectivity is what we have come to expect in advertising.
Corporate image advertising is different. The whole purpose of that kind of campaign is to build public trust.
When the balloon is burst, you feel the same letdown as when the moral zealot gets caught in some young person's bed.
Don't be fooled again
This is what has happened to BP. Having told us such a whopper, we won't trust them again.
As Kevin O'Leary suggested last night on CBC's Lang & O'Leary Exchange, the BP brand might even be too distasteful to keep. Perhaps it will be replaced by the Amoco name the company also owns.
I'm not sure there is evidence that BP is any worse than other energy companies. All horrible accidents are to some extent a series of unfortunate incidents.
Exxon took flack for the Valdez spill. But then Exxon never said it was anything but a big grimy energy company trying to drill and sell as much oil as possible.
There are definitely those who have pointed a finger at BP for bad environmental practices, both this time round and in the past.
Claiming to be environmentally conscious when you are not has a special name: "Greenwashing." On that count, Greenpeace UK used a bit of theatre not long ago to give the company its Emerald Paintbrush award.
That was in December 2008. But now things are much worse.
BP is not just the butt of jokes from the green lobby. Scoffing at the polluter of the Louisiana coast has gone mainstream.
So what can we learn from BP's fall from green grace?
Recently there has been a new full-page ad running in Canadian newspapers, which shows a sincere-looking blue-eyed man standing in front of a forest.
There is no oil to be seen and there are certainly no pictures of tailings ponds along the Athabasca River.
The ad says the man cares about the land and that he is learning to grow trees faster. In letters at the bottom of the page we learn that this is "A message from Canada's Oil Sands Producers."
I'm not sure this is a good time to be running ads like these. We have been fooled before. And it still hurts.