BP Buys "Oil Spill" Search Term

technology_dude found an unsurprising but amusing little story that BP is buying keywords on Google and Yahoo for things like "Oil Spill" to help spin some damage control. I guess if you can't plug your spill, the least you can do is try to clog the flow of information.

Comments

have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[swschrad]

how about they concentrate their efforts a mile down instead?

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[Leebert]

Good question. I mean, I hear that the janitors are still cleaning the toilets in BP headquarters! Where are their priorities?!

Seriously, they're a big company, they can focus on more than one thing at a time... It's like the Mythical Man-Month -- Just throwing resources at the problem isn't necessarily going to make it better, and could well make it worse.

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[Yvan256]

It's not that they're doing more than one thing at a time, it's that they're trying to get the top results for "oil spill" so that real news are pushed down the list of results.

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[Lumpy]

How exactly can the PR and marketing department assist a mile underwater?

use their bodies to plug up the well?

Honestly it's the best use for marketing and PR people....

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[Fnkmaster]

If by "real news" you mean "more media hype" then yes. We get it - the oil spill is an environmental disaster. It's bad for BP, it's really bad for fisherman in the Gulf, and it's generally bad for the economy in all the Gulf states, and it's definitely bad for the marine ecosystem.

BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap. The CEO is going to be toast along with quite a few other people as soon as they have the situation calmed down - the board just doesn't want to toast him until things quiet down a bit. The other companies involved, Transocean, Andarko, etc. have suffered proportionally similar blows, accounting for 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.

And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.

The only worse penalty BP as a corporate organization could pay at this point is a firesale takeover (because their successor will have to eat the huge contingent liability here). If somebody or somebodies at BP were negligent or actively broke safety regulations, then by all means, they should be criminally prosecuted for their actions. Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.

But this ... obsession ... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished. There are a bunch of marketing and PR weenies on staff at BP and they are just trying to do their jobs here. There's nothing wrong with them promoting the site they put up as a source of information for the public about the oil spill.

What's more, at this point, more economic damage is actually being done by media hype than by oil itself. The damage to the Florida tourism industry isn't being caused by a few tar balls that washed up, it's being caused by panicked morons canceling their vacations because of what they saw on the news. While I'm all for BP and friends covering the costs of actual damage from their oil spill, I don't think it's reasonable to hold anybody other than the media accountable for the damage from their hype machine, and I can't blame BP's PR people for trying to do what they can to get their side of the story out there (as long as they aren't simply lying about it).

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[AGMW]

Yep ... that seems to cover it.

Oddly, the situations is somewhat more complex than the army of armchair deep sea drilling experts suspect. LMAO @ "... lower a large cork ..."! You'll be suggesting they just put a tray under the sump plug and drain it from there next!

Anyone who honestly thinks BP isn't doing E V E R Y T H I N G in its power to stem the flow is a fool. Apart from the pollution considerations, the bad PR, and of course not forgetting the clamour from the large cork manufactures now wanting a slice of the action, if they're now pulling 10000 barrels a day from that well and a barrel runs at around 70 bucks ... well, I'd say you do the math(s) but someone might suggest I lower a cork on it so I'll do it for ya - $700000!
That they are also trying to stem the flow of bad publicity is totally understandable too, because people keep posting asshat ideas like "lower a large cork" and all the numbnuts dolts read that and nod saying, "yer ... why dontcha just lower a large cork BP? Eh? Why dontcha?". And people cheering when buffoons suggest that the whole company should concentrate their efforts a mile down instead - does he expect every PA, secretary, programmer, lorry driver, pump attendant, etc, to all be controlling their own ROV at the site?

Now I'm not saying BP are squeaky clean in this - my guess is that BP suspect that capping the well is nigh on impossible without the relief wells easing the pressure though obviously they'll keep trying - but to think they don't want to stop the oil flow is frankly as ludicrous a concept as having every BP employee lowering their very own large cork!

As Fnkmaster (89084) wrote: (on Tuesday June 08, @01:49PM (#32499016)) ... the "punish BP" bloodlust ... is crazy when so many Americans work in the industry as all you're doing is shooting yourselves in the foot! If BP doesn't do the deep drilling someone else will and maybe the next company to do it won't be hiring so many Americans and pumping so much money into the US economy?

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[Chris Burke]

BP has already suffered a near crippling blow. They have lost *100 billion* dollars in market cap. ... 10s of billions of dollars in additional market cap wiped out.

Oh noes, not market cap! That's the thing about market cap -- it can be wiped out instantly, but it can come back too, and the only people who lose anything are the ones who sold while it was down. If BP was planning on buying out a smaller oil company using shares of their stock, well, now would be a bad time to do that. Oh noes!

In the meantime, BP continues to make real profits to the tune of tens of millions per day.

I'm not saying it's not a blow, but it's hardly crippling. Companies can continue to operate and make substantial profits even after tremendous stock price drops. And if BP does continue to make money, then their stock price will recover.

And the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs in the inevitable restructurings that will come, and those jobs will end up going elsewhere, since we still will be consuming the oil here.

It's an odd mentality, where the cause-and-effect here wouldn't be the obvious "Executive negligence in their company losing many jobs", but rather "the public caring that the executives cut corners and ignored signs because it would cost time and thus money resulted in this disaster, and subsequent job loss".

Yes, obviously the solution is that we should not care!

No. If people attributed cause and effect correctly, maybe we'd get some real change around here.

Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised. If they did something criminal, they should be prosecuted too.

Oh noes they'll be fired from their cushy jobs! They might have to lay low living off their scant millions for a while before getting a cushy VP job somewhere else because the last thing the incestuous network of corporate executives and board members want is to raise standards.

Nothing short of criminal prosecution will be any kind of real punishment. I'm not holding my breath on the end result, but at least one thing is going right.

But this ... obsession ... with personalizing "BP" as some sort of entity that has committed an evil act that we can "punish" in any way further than has already been done is baffling to me. People - it's *been* punished.

Yeah, by only making half as much net profit -- estimates of BP's efforts at cleanup and stopping the leak per day are about half of their net profit per day.

Oh, the punishment! Their Q2 and Q3 earnings statements will be less glowing! They may be penalized in the market, until the expected profits return! Please. Call me when they go into the red, even for a single quarter.

By the way, the obsession with personalizing a corporation as some sort of entity unto itself has been the obsession of the corporate executives since early last century. Is it any wonder that we have bought into the delusion that "BP" can do anything on its own? "Corporate personhood" is their baby.

If you want to end that delusion, I'm all for it. But realize that the executives themselves are on the other side of this one from you, as is for that matter the law.

Actually, that's surprisingly competent

[rwa2]

I'd have expected less of them... But I guess they're doing pretty well so far with their coverage on bp.com and using dispersants to keep most of the spill at depth and keeping away science vessels so they're free to misunderestimate the true magnitude.

Wonder what their PR budget is compared to their recovery budget.

It may seem egregious and offensive

[idontgno]

but this really isn't news. Money has a voice. More money has a louder voice. Lots of money can shout out all other voices.

I hope the search providers enjoy their windfall. I hope the states, the Feds, and the individual victims of this disaster take careful note of how much money is being spent on non-productive spin control, rather than actually fixing the problem and cleaning up the aftermath.

Re:Who Cares

[qoncept]

This is a pretty ignorant, if rhetorical, question. Along the lines of asking what good replacing a 100w incandescent light bulb with a 23w CFL is in the grand scheme of things. The answer? The single light bulb and the single PR marketing action make virtually no impact. Are they pointless?

BP obviously wants to continue operating and overcome this disaster. Regardless of what other actions they take, do you think that is possible WITHOUT trying to boost their image through PR?

Re:Who Cares

[GameMaster]

Yes. It worked, for the most part, for Exxon and Union Carbide. They'll, probably, just try to play by the play-book those two companies used. History shows that the public has a short memory/attention span.

Re:Who Cares

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that they've been at the "warmer, fuzzier, more baby-seal-loving, oil company" PR game for something like a decade now(I'm guessing that they might be doing a little less advertising in National Geographic in the near future; but they were all over the place with their "Beyond Petroleum" spin) I'd assume that they have an entrenched internal culture that is convinced of exactly that.

Given the public's relatively short attention span, and the fervor of the ostensibly-libertarian-but-basically-authoritarian-corporatist wing, which blithely asserts that any state interference in the sovereign right of corporations to do whatever the fuck they want, or even say mean things when the inevitable consequences occur, is socialist fascism; they may well be correct.

So... I can transfer money from BP to Google?

[localman57]

So let me get this straight... I can go to Google, type in "oil spill" then click on one of BP's sponsored links. And in the act of doing this, I can magically transfer money, real money, from a company that fucked up the environment to one that gives me free software like Chrome, and Google Earth, and Android?

Hell yeah!

Ha, jokes on them

[harris s newman]

Wait till they declare a profit this quarter. The whole country will draw and quarter them.

Re:Who Cares

[MightyMartian]

I'm saying at this point I don't think they can boost their image. Wasting money on PR seems like throwing money down the toilet. There's a point at which you're so reviled that any attempt to make yourself look less despicable only feeds into the negative view the public has of you.

Re:Who Cares

[MightyMartian]

They have tried to minimize the spill. They're estimates were bullshit. They're claim that there were no plumes is bullshit. Their claim that they're fully funding the cleanup is bullshit. They got called out very publicly by a group of Gulf coast mayors who literally had to crash a press conference where their reps were coating themselves in all sorts of nauseating platitudes to reveal that BP hasn't even returned these guys' phone calls.

What BP should do is apologize about fifty times a day, do what it's claiming it's doing, stop trying to bullshit everyone about the extent of the damage, and goddamn well take what's coming to it. I mean, these are oil patch guys, but they're behaving like a bunch of stupid pissy prissies.

Why are we supposed to be angry again?

[unjedai]

So BP is spending their money on ads for a relevant search term and when you click on the ad you are lead to information on what they are doing with the oil spill. And we're supposed to be angry at them for doing this? Huh? Maybe their info is bogus or they should be providing more info. Maybe they have totally botched the oil spill. But it would make more sense to me if people were outraged if they DIDN'T buy ads that lead people to information.

Well, almost everything...

[Chris Burke]

Anyone who honestly thinks BP isn't doing E V E R Y T H I N G in its power to stem the flow is a fool.

I believe that BP has every incentive to stop the leak.

I also believe BP has every incentive to do so as cheaply as possible. For instance, they originally wanted to only drill one relief well until Congress insisted they start on another one. Why? Well because a relief well is not a guaranteed fixe. Sometimes the first one you drill doesn't do much, assuming you even succeed in hitting the foot-wide hole with the other foot-wide hole you're drilling at an angle through miles of rock.

I am not about to second-guess the engineers who are busting their ass working on fixes. I fully realize that what they are trying to do is exceedingly difficult -- I mean, that's part of why it's such a big problem. However that also applies to the relief wells. With the problems that keep coming up in all the other attempted solutions, just assuming that a single relief well will work on the first try seems ludicrous. Could the extra cost possibly outweigh the impact if the relief well fails and oil spews until they can go through the whole process of drilling another? Could you, as an engineer, justify that lack of redundancy when solving a problem of this magnitude?

But those decisions aren't made by engineers. Engineers quantify the risks as best they can, and executives make the decision off the summary middle management hands them. For them, maybe the cost vs risk works out? Maybe a mentality that you cut corners and do the minimum (or less) and just hope things work out is so entrenched that they would still try it even after things had already failed to work out?

And not that I don't think their Top Kill attempt was anything but sincere, but that's exactly why it strikes me as odd that you'd mention that $700000/day figure for siphoning oil as some kind of incentive for plugging the well. When they really fix the well it won't be usable anymore. So no more oil. Which gives them the opposite incentive. Again, this is just the thought train your observation led me down.