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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.
how about they concentrate their efforts a mile down instead?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If i google "oil spill" here (Netherlands) it does not show sponsered links.
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.
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.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The worst part of this oil spill is that you can't even boycott BP effectively without also boycotting the local gas station owner and the whole refinery chain. Say that this shady keyword purchasing damage control made you so upset that you went down and picketed the BP station in your neighborhood. Well, you might be affecting BP a little but you're having a much larger impact on the guy who owns that station. A huge impact if you're there all day appealing to people's empathy for the Gulf.
What can I do? Write my senator demanding what exactly?
My work here is dung.
Suddenly I'm proud to be British. God save the Queen!
@BPGlobalPR
By the way, we made it so if you google image search "oil spill" or "bp" you'll see some great celeb sideboob pics. #bpcares
Ah, the fun we poke.
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?
Whale
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.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
BP - "One of the World Leaders in Oil Spills and Public Relations Damage Control"
Have you spilled oil today? Our P.R. team can help!
ipv6 is my vpn
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.
Hell yeah!
Related: http://digg.com/comedy/Massive_Flow_Of_Bull****_Continues_To_Gush_From_BP
One is to:
www.BP.com/OilSpillNews "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping."
The other is:
Tar Ball Burner(tm) "Collect free tar balls from beaches and turn them into unleaded gas!"
Please slashdot both of them.
"His name was James Damore."
Wait till they declare a profit this quarter. The whole country will draw and quarter 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.
Science vessels? According to Newsweek, it's photographers and people looking to document the damage that BP is turning away. Now that's some unadulterated bullshit "damage control."
I heard on NPR that some people looking to investigate beaches were turned away by policeman and when they asked the policemen who was paying them to do that the policeman said they were off duty police officers employed by BP. I don't know if that's true or if the people are lying but the stinks worse than crude if it's the truth and I hope the US AG criminal investigation gets to the bottom of that.
My work here is dung.
Relax, dude, I'm pretty sure we can all find plenty of things to blame BP for without pretending that buying keyword impressions is somehow harmful.
Go google "oil spill". Sure enough, the top sponsored link will be the BP oil spill site. The other sponsored link will be... yet another partison point of view from someone who was willing to pay to get a message out. That's what sponsored links are.
Right below them - right where they always are - you still find the real search results. How that squares with the flow of information being "clogged" is beyond me.
I'd find more to complain about if BP wasn't trying to present a strong media presence. You know, saying "I'd like my life back" or something like that.
Hey, be fair! They didn't leave their pumps unattended. 11 of the attendees died.
The Valdez incident was in a fairly unpopulated part of a state with a very small population. Union Carbide was in India, and thus not only a long way off, but impacting foreigners.
This is literally happening in a very populated, economically important region of the Continental United States. I mean, these people still talk about Hurricane Andrew, so no, I don't think they'll be forgetting how BP poisoned the Gulf Coast.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You're out of your mind if you think they are going to get the bill for "what they have destroyed". I'm sure they'll be fined an amount that SEEMS like a lot to everyday joes, but is in fact next to meaningless to a huge corp. like BP. A big enough fine should preclude them from declaring any profit for that quarter - wait and see, I'm sure they'll be declaring plenty of profit...
Completely BS writeup of the article. This is a straightforward and common tactic used by companies in situations like this. Yes, with all the band-wagoning and rhetoric surrounding the issue its not even a bad idea. The spill is obviously a tragedy of incredible proportions, which invites entirely too much disinformation, half truth and anecdotal evidence. No matter what BP did here they would be crucified for either having no strategy, or (like the poster did) assuming the strategy was a CYA move. Everyone is so busy hating right now must forget that BP was a darling until this happened. They gave 7 million to politicians last year, testified before congress, were given one of the largest tax breaks in history by the bush regime. we all helped create this monster. live with it.
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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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I just typed "gulf oil spill" in Google. What I came up with is three stories; one about Obama trying to deflect criticism about his handling of the spill, one about the confirmation of oil plumes (and once again BP is caught lying, BTW), and one about the fight to contain the oil spill to last months.
About the only really questionable one is a site obviously put up by BP called gulfoilspill.com, and it's a helluva laugh to read.
Google is not giving BP good PR. In fact, because of its news scanning, it's putting negative news stories at the top of the results.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You do realise that they've bought an ad space, they're not paying to bury all the other organic search results. It's one ad that appears in the clearly marked sponsored area and links to a page that gives some information about how they're trying (and failing) to do anything, with some webcams and a pitiful "have you got any ideas to help?" request. It's hardly preventing people finding the information they want, any more than Dulux are trying to destroy our cultural heritage by preventing us accessing information on the great artists because they show an ad when I search for "painting".
Well of course we need oil. We need gold too, but would you just shrug your shoulders if they were mining it in your backyard and managed to poison your property with mercury? That we need various commodities doesn't mean that we should give companies free passes on damage.
I never understand the sort of equivocation posters like you put forth. What does that even mean? Oh well, we've got to put up with the destruction of economically important fisheries and tourist areas because WE NEED OIL! I mean, that's the justification of a drug addict, not of a sensible individual.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
While it may be good PR for them to have what they have on the Oil Spill link, it actually IS a very helpful link versus the rest of the results. Have you actually looked at what they have on that page? While the highlighted area is basically to let people know what they are doing, there is a bunch of very useful information and links also on that page. Important phone numbers, links to the four State response websites, ROV footage...stuff that they don't HAVE to put on a "Damage Control" link. They may only have done it because that was the only way to have any hope of repairing their image once this is over, but it's a better source of information that most of the other links you'll find in the results. AND it's in the sponsored link section, clearly pointing out that it's not just a run of the mill search result.
The only problem is that there's no good solution here. BP's people aren't the only ones trying to stop the leak, you've got engineers from all of the big companies working on this. They all see the damage that this spill is doing to their industry and want it stopped. The point is that nobody knows how to stop this, short of relief wells. There's already a ton of uncertainty about how much oil has leaked, how much more is going to leak, what's going to happen to all that oil under the water, what happens when a hurricane tears through the gulf, whether or not the oil will find its way around florida and up the east coast, and who knows what else is going to happen in the next 6-8 weeks before the relief wells have drilled deep enough.
There's just way too much uncertainty about when the leak will be fixed, what the actual ecological and economic damage will be, and how hard the government will eventually come down on BP. I don't think that anyone who really looks at the situation could reliably predict what sort of financial liabilities you'd be purchasing if you bought BP. You'd be insane to seriously consider buying them right now.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
Ah yes, the ol' "the media is evil vs. the just-a-little-evil-company/politician/organization".
Whatever the media has been doing, it's BP whose spinning is making things worse. They lied about the amount of oil leaking. They tried to deny there were oil plumes, basically calling a number of experts alarmists. They've bullshitted about the amount of aid they've been providing, the amount of work they've been doing on the cleanup.
BP isn't just "not perfect", it's a pack of self-serving liars who, on top of everything else, are too fucking stupid to realize that every line of bullshit they try to foist on the public gets them in even more trouble.
The truth may not set you free, but sometimes it at least can mitigate the damage. If they had said three or four weeks ago "we could be leaking up to 20,000 barrels a day", yes, they would have gone a lot of bad press, but at least the bad press wouldn't have involved "you're lying bastards". The same with the oil plumes.
The people that caused this disaster were BP. The people who are creating a fair amount of the bad PR is BP. As the old saying goes, "blaming the press is like a captain blaming the sea".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Damn, and I just ran out of mod points.
This is the feeling I and everyone I know gets when we see BP commercials about how they're fixing stuff. "STFU and get back to work." No one wants to hear BP talk about how hard they're working. The only thing anyone is interested in hearing is "The leak is plugged, the oil has been skimmed, and life is returning to normal." Anything else just backfires and makes BPs image worse.
If I were in BP's shoes, I'd buy ad space and show a live 30-second feed of the rovers, the meetings and engineers cranking away in cubicles and on boats.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In order words, BP has almost 40x the incidents than all their competitors combined.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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