I’m Sure the Environment Wants its Life Back Too, Tony Hayward: An Examination of BP’s Marketing Tactics Post-Deepwater Horizon

Section One: Overview of the BP Oil Spill

BP (formerly British Petroleum) was established in 1909 and is the fourth largest investor-owned oil company in the world. The company used to be majority-owned by the state but was privatized in the 1970’s-1980’s. In the long-standing tradition of both oil companies and any British institution established before approximately the 70’s the company has an incredibly sketchy history and can likely be tied to many of the current issues in the Middle East today. The point of this paper isn’t to examine the evils of all oil companies and their damage to the environment, nor to look into the history of Western exploitation of the Middle East.

In April of 2010 Deepwater Horizon, an ultra-deepwater, semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig owned by Transocean and operated by BP drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded. The explosion killed 11 people aged 22-56 and caused a full collapse two days later, causing the largest marine oil spill in history. The oil spill lasted from April 20 to July 15. It leaked an estimated 134,000,000 gallons of oil affecting an area approximately the size of Oklahoma and reaching the coasts of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. This spill still affects the area and will likely never be the same again.

Section Two: BP’s Marketing, PR, And Promotional Mistakes

Issue One

“I’d like my life back,” on May 30, 2010 BP CEO was on a goodwill tour of the areas devastated by the oil spill his company caused stated that “there's no one who wants this thing over more than I do, I'd like my life back.” This statement caused a huge backlash from thousands of people, notably including then US President, Barack Obama who said that Hayward “wouldn’t be working for me after any of those statements.” As indicated by Obama this wasn’t the only idiotic statement made by the then-CEO. Notably, Tony Hayward took over as CEO of BP in 2007 from Lord John Browne whose emphasis on putting profits over safety caused a fire that killed 15 people in Texas. Hayward pledged to focus “like a laser” on safety. Here are some more of his greatest hits: early on in the spill Hayward complained to his fellow executives “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” In a May 13 interview, he stated “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” In a May 18 interview, he stated that the environmental impact of the spill “will be very, very modest.” On May 30, the same day as the infamous “I want my life back” quote Hayward responded to reports that cleanup workers were falling ill by saying “Food poisoning is clearly a big issue.” One day later Hayward was faced with scientific studies that showed large clouds of oil were forming deep underwater, so Hayward decided creating an imaginary reality was easier. He stated, “The oil is on the surface, there aren’t any plumes.” Hayward disastrously appeared before Congress on June 17 and appeared to not know anything about anything, and not be able to recall anything either. Unsurprisingly, Hayward was replaced as CEO shortly after.

Sometimes you see a young celebrity, like Renee Rapp, who clearly doesn’t have any media training. She says funny and out-of-pocket things in interviews and is honest in moments where most people wouldn’t be. It’s charming when one of the stars of the Mean Girls Musical has no PR training, it’s horrifying when the CEO of a Fortune 500 company addresses an environmental disaster with the same tact as an idiot teenager (an idiot teenager who made approximately 3,000,000 in salary and bonuses in 2009, and resigned in disgrace while pocketing almost a million dollars and a pension of $10 million.) The CEO Tony Hayward’s response was insensitive, self-pitying, and tone-deaf in the face of the worst environmental disaster ever. He downplayed the severity of the crisis to a reckless extent. He downplayed the effect on the ocean, which still hasn’t recovered. He downplayed the reports of illness in cleanup workers. He denied reality when faced with evidence of oil plumes. His Congressional testimony cemented in the minds of everyone watching that BP’s leadership was both incompetent and unaccountable, a truly shameful showing.

Issue Two

In the four months after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill BP spent $93.4 million on advertising, triple the amount spent by the company in the same period in the year prior. BP told the House Energy and Commerce Committee “that they have increased advertising expenditures for a number of reasons, including to keep Gulf Coast residents informed of issues relating to the oil spill and recovery and to ensure transparency during the recovery process.” One of the examples of this stellar crisis response was a reportedly 50-million-dollar national TV ad, wherein shining star Tony Hayward pledges: “We will make this right,” that BP would clean up every drop of oil and “restore the shoreline to its original state.” (They did not and still have not.) Barack Obama was intensely critical of the spending on these ads, saying that the money should have gone to cleanup and compensation for the people affected. BP also bought a number of ads that appeared at the top of search engines when people attempted to look up information about the oil spill, the ads linking to BP’s oil-response sites. Ostensibly these ads are to help people in the Gulf find the correct forms and information they need, if they happen to block other search engine results that’s just a coincidence. Two years after the incident BP revealed their intentions to spend $500 million on repairing their public image. 

Beginning in 2000 BP began a rebranding campaign changing its name to Beyond Petroleum intending to highlight its commitment to environmentalism in gas and oil, (a nonsense and antithetical idea.) It’s deeply ironic how publicly that idea crashed and burned (a poor choice of words.) Numbers-wise the money spent on advertising was only a fraction of the reported $65 billion on legal fees and clean-up costs (of that $65 billion only $16 billion went to clean up,) but it’s the optics of the situation that really matter. Instead of allocating all of their resources to fix the problem they caused they were spending millions of dollars on advertising to try and make themselves look better in the face of one of the worst negligent screw-ups a company could make. A negligent screw-up that killed 11 people and millions of creatures, the full extent of which is still being uncovered to this day 14 years later. As Musician Brent Burns’ song addressing the situation put it: "I'm sorry's not enough. You've got to mop it up. Stop tap dancing all around the truth. You tried to save a buck, now we've got all this muck. Keep cleaning till it looks brand new."

Issue Three

As demonstrated in previous sections BP put in a lot of effort to make themselves look better to the public, and one of the ways they did so was by intentionally downplaying the severity, responsibility, and effects of the crisis. In yet another wonderful showing of Tony Hayward opening his mouth and stupid falling out, two weeks after the spill he claimed to BBC that while BP was absolutely responsible for cleaning up the accident they were not responsible for the accident. "This was not our accident…This was not our drilling rig…This was Transocean's rig. Their systems. Their people. Their equipment." An internal inquiry of the spill several weeks later said "A number of companies are involved, including BP, and it is simply too early – and not up to us – to say who is at fault". Even in internal reports BP attempted to find anyone other than themselves to blame. Transocean leased the Deepwater Horizon rig to BP from 2001 until 2013, and while they undoubtedly bear a degree of responsibility it’s clear from the vastly lower civil penalty ($1.4 billion) compared to BP’s total costs ($64 billion) that their degree of responsibility was much, much lower.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” This was Hayward’s statement several weeks after the leak, a leak that was still ongoing. This is obviously not true, but it goes even deeper, “BP has said in the past that it learned of the spill's full extent months after the April 2010 blowout. But the emails indicate that the company knew almost immediately after the drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and injuring 17, that the spill may be extraordinarily large.” It was revealed in the criminal case that BP knew that this situation was catastrophic but chose to lie to the public about the true extent, claiming that high (accurate) reporting of flow rate was “scaremongering”. All this while espousing their dedication to providing prompt, full disclosure to the public and the government about the leak. BP ended up pleading guilty to felony charges including lying to Congress about the leak, with individuals facing charges of obstruction of justice. 

Lying to everyone about the crisis you caused is bad practice, and eventually, the truth will come out. People aren’t stupid, eventually, they will see through the artifice to the monster within. It’s the companies call how shocked they want the public to be when they finally see the monster.

Cynically, I think it’s better to be honest about the fact that your company is evil. If you hear something evil did something reprehensible you shrug it off. The shoe fits, of course, the baby-eating company ate a baby, that’s what they do. But when the Super Nice to Babies company eats a baby everyone is shocked and horrified. That’s when people pick up the pitchforks. People hate being lied to. The more false you are beforehand the angrier they are when the truth is revealed. I’m aware this is an overly simplistic way of looking at things, and my Frankenstein-inspired metaphor could use some work, but I stand by it.

Issue Four

In the early scrambling days of the Deepwater crisis, both BP and the government were holding daily in-person briefings with media personnel, and allowing questions. In the following weeks, they were far less forthcoming. They relied on tightly controlled teleconferences and limits on who could ask questions and how many they could act. BP had an information leakage problem, the press increasingly went to engineers and other high-ups to ask questions, bypassing the irritated media team who insisted they be contacted first. Likely those reporters were sick of the “very carefully controlled and sparingly arranged” media visits to the Houston-based command center. 

I mentioned earlier the buying of ads as a redirection strategy, those ads showed up at the top of search engines when people attempted to look up information about the spill and linked the BP’s oil response pages. It was a distraction tactic but also a silencing tactic, with people being less likely to see information other than that which BP chose to release on platforms they could control and moderate. 

Reports began to surface of journalists being denied access to beaches and damage addressing flights over affected areas despite promises by BP and the US government to be transparent. This aggravated the public, the media, and response teams causing BP to respond by stating that BP “fully supports and defends all individuals’ rights to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if they so choose.” They also denied that clean-up workers had been banned from speaking to the media. This was in direct opposition to reports from New Orleans that private security guards were patrolling sections of Grand Isle, barring reporters from walking on the public oil-stained beach and speaking with clean-up workers. This was one of a number of incidents that prompted the Associated Press to contact the then press secretary Robert Gibbs, demanding that the president improve journalistic access.

There’s a part of me that thinks that perhaps Tony Hayward was the sacrificial lamb of an actually competent PR strategy. If everyone is focused on the bumbling moron saying stupid things publicly, no one looks behind the curtain to the carefully calculated selective silence from the press team. If the president is calling out this individual personally, there certainly is nothing the government is attempting to cover up like the fact they allowed BP to cut corners and self-regulate, ignored reports of corruption within the federal oversight agency, dismissed concerns by its scientists, and more. Perhaps this is the conspiracy theorist in me or the part that whispers that you should never trust the government. Regardless of what it actually was BP (and possibly the government) evidently found it worthwhile to spend their time silencing journalists rather than being upfront about the truth of the situation and the efforts of those intending to rectify said situation. Perhaps their time truly was better spent the way the Vice president of BP’s US communications spent his time in 2014, giving speeches in the directly impacted New Orleans at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference where he stated that the company’s efforts to clean up the spill had been obscured by the ill intentions of opportunistic environmentalists, shoddy science, and the sloppy work of environmental journalists in the face of hundreds of environmental journalists.

Issue Five

Let’s be clear on a few things: fossil fuels are killing the planet, oil companies have known this since at least the late ‘50s, and they have engaged in a massive misinformation campaign for decades in order to keep people unaware of the inevitable repercussions of climate change. 

This paper isn’t to criticize that specifically, but it leads into one of BP’s unethical PR decisions surrounding the infamous spill.

Greenwashing is the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is. In the year 2000 BP rebranded (mentioned above) from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. They unveiled their new logo,  a sun with green around the edges, very cool and eco. The new sun logo was called The Helios after the sun god. It was meant to represent BP’s dedication to renewable energy like solar and wind power. BP ran ads that included the lines “Beyond darkness there is light,” “Beyond fear, there is courage,” “Beyond power, responsibility,” culminating in the pivotal “Beyond Petroleum.”  (All this to cleanse the palate of the taste of oil and blood, as if removing the British from their name erases their role in convincing the US government to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Iran in order to install a dictator sympathetic to their capitalistic aims.) Unfortunately, these ads worked, in 2008 surveys showed at least one-third of people considered BP to be a green brand. In fact, BP spent more on its rebrand than it had on renewable energy in the previous year. The aforementioned disgraced Lord John Browne pledged to spend $8.3 billion on renewable energy over the next ten years, which is a lot of money, but only actually represents about 5% of their expenditures. The other 95% was spent on oil and gas.

BP has been engaged in greenwashing for a long time, and they cashed it in big time during the spill. “Using gas prices, sales, and station affiliations, as well as data on BP’s ad spending, the researchers reach a troubling conclusion: consumers did “punish” BP temporarily following the spill, but that punishment “was significantly reduced by pre-spill exposure to BP advertising during the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ campaign years.” In other words, green advertising functioned as an insurance policy against the cost of an environmental disaster.” The same report found that in higher-income areas the public was far less likely to be harsh to BP regardless of all other factors. Higher-income communities tend towards environmental consciousness, yet the rich were still unwilling to be overly critical of a disaster that killed almost a dozen people and millions of sea creatures vital to the health of the planet. The more an area had been advertised to pre-spill and during the spill the more favorable they were to the company. It also applied to gas station owners, the numbers following the same trends. The higher the pre-spill advertising the less likely they were to switch suppliers after the spill.

Unsurprisingly and despite their pretty words BP (and other oil giants) were found to be active members of trade organizations lobbying against climate protection measures in multiple countries including the United States. BP stated they were trying to create change from within, a real putting the fire out from inside the house doused in oil, releasing insane amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere choking millions, and increasing the creeping pace of the inevitable climate disasters that will kill us all. They have hilariously promised to eliminate their carbon footprint and lobby for “advocacy for policies that support net zero,” while refusing to disclose the full list of trade associations they are members of. All of this is in an attempt to rebuild trust in BP as if anyone on Earth should ever trust an oil company, especially BP. Another one of the many intrinsic ways they violated their climate commitments was the fact that in 2011 (one year after Deepwater Horizon) the company sold off its solar energy business. In 2014 they sold off their wind farms. In the same year, they ended their 10-year renewable energy plan a year early.

Fossil fuels are likely to kill the planet at some point in the next couple hundred years, but as I’ve said, this paper isn't about that. Ten out of ten times I’ll take an honest bastard over a nice liar. Perhaps it’s a bad PR strategy to be blatant about the fact that you don’t care at all what happens to the planet, but at least it’s honest. The greenwashing farce of BP is incredibly damaging and is a carcinogenic smoke screen used to distract from the demonstrable harm their actions are causing to the planet and its inhabitants every single day. It allows them to distract from the fact that they aren’t actually doing anything for anyone other than their shareholders, and looking good while doing it. Even the most ambitious diva in their highest heels eventually falls, but that diva usually isn’t positioned to take down 8 billion people with it. 

Section Three: What Should Have Happened?

I’ll admit it, I am deeply biased against oil companies. I live on planet Earth and would like to continue to do so without being a victim of the client wars/apocalypse over the horizon. After causing the worst environmental disaster in recorded history the company should have been destroyed, but would that really have made a difference? Would any other company have actually done anything better? Or, in my likely estimation, would they have done the exact same thing? If Shell (formerly Royal Dutch Shell, founded also in London with an equally bloody imperialistic history) had been the one to lease Deepwater Horizon instead of BP would they have implemented more stringent safety precautions or would they have done the exact same thing? Seeing as how they also had an 80,000-gallon oil spill in the very same gulf just six years later, I doubt it. Maybe an American company like Exxon… no, they spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska two decades previous. There’s no such thing as a good oil company, and if you kill one head another head appears to take its place. The entire industry needs to be killed before another Deepwater happens and before the environment reaches the point of no return, a point we may well have already hit. The total cost BP had to pay was reportedly around $63-65 billion dollars on cleanup costs, legal settlements, and compensation to both individuals and businesses. How much did BP make in 2011, one year later? $386 billion. The costs these companies have to pay for committing horrible atrocities and causing incalculable human suffering is just the cost of doing business, they know they’ll make it all back eventually and they and their shareholders will whine about the profit loss in the meantime until the plutocratic government ‘gives in’ to the whims of the wealthy at the expense of the devastation they have left behind.