BP Buys "Oil Spill" Search Term 439
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.
have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
how about they concentrate their efforts a mile down instead?
Actually, that's surprisingly competent (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Can't Even Boycott the Bastards (Score:3, Insightful)
What can I do? Write my senator demanding what exactly?
Re:Who Cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell yeah!
Re:Can't Even Boycott the Bastards (Score:2, Insightful)
Ha, jokes on them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They really ought to save their money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who Cares (Score:4, Insightful)
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:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't give them ideas.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Who Cares (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It may seem egregious and offensive (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything, every dime they put toward stupid commercials and other PR stunts should be matched (by them) and put into a "Future of the Gulf Coast" fund where it can be used solely for long term needs to be determined at a later date. Then, in 10 years when the fisheries still are in a terrible state and BP is in a legal battle over how the cleanup was handled and what government did what without BPs consent they will have a little money to put toward rebuilding the ecology of the coast.
Re:Who Cares (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who Cares (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like anybody is going to confuse a site on bp.com with real news.
Probably the reason is that reporting of the oil spill cleanup efforts are riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods. I was reading several news organizations reports on the "top hat" approach a month or so ago and the amount of variability was insane, given that all they had to do was accurately re-print what BP Engineering had published. Some papers actually claimed it was "ice" clogging up the device for goodness sake.
People like to make out that corporate PR is some kind of money-based mind control mechanism. And a small amount actually is that (typically the dedicated PR firms). But having seen in-house corporate PR men do their work first hand, it became apparent that 99% of the effort is just trying to ensure journalists don't screw up basic facts.
Now if BP are publishing things on their landing pages that are verifiably false then my argument doesn't stand, but I doubt that. Even the how-much-oil-spills debacle seems likely to be genuine disagreement rather than a real attempt to mislead.
Re:Somebody should buy BP (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Why are we supposed to be angry again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:2, Insightful)
rarely does the throwing of real resources at a problem "well make it worse".
Forgive me, but that is kind of a naïve position to take. We're talking about marketing people, here. They are otherwise useless. ;)
But seriously, you want BP to send marketing people down to the Gulf to help shut off an oil well? Or even to help clean up the spill? (which is likely more resource and equipment constrained, than people constrained) When it comes to certain tasks, you CAN'T just throw unequipped, inexperienced/untrained resources at it. I admit to not knowing for certain that this is the case here.
Perhaps you are from the BP PR department feeling a bit defensive
Look, BP deserves to be crucified for this. More than they will be, and we all know that. But that doesn't mean I'm going to shut off my capability to use logic and reason.
Re:Who Cares (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So... I can transfer money from BP to Google? (Score:3, Insightful)
No it wouldn't. BP contracted with Google for visibility and clicks. Google contracted with BP for payment. BP gets its visibility and clicks, and Google gets its payment.
It's no business of BP's how Google drives traffic to BP or what Google does with the money, unless the contract itself contains limitations on those things.
Moral: when selling your soul, make sure you read what you sign.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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! ... 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?
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
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) [slashdot.org] 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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Top execs will already pay the price when they get the boot from their cushy jobs for the poor oversight they have exercised.
Yeah, where's the sympathy for those poor executives. How will Tony Hayward survive without his 2.5 million pound compensation package? If he gets fired and can't find another job, he might have to live in only semi-luxury for the rest of his life! The horror!
Well, almost everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [yahoo.com] until Congress insisted they start on another one. Why? Well because a relief well is not a guaranteed fixe [salon.com]. 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.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice rant. I'll only bother with addressing the parts with content.
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".
I don't know how you got this from what I said. I never suggested that the public caring about the environment is to blame for lost jobs - I said that panicked vacation cancellations are to blame for more damage to local economies than the *actual* damage from the oil spill up to this point. And that a media frenzy contributes to this panic reaction.
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.
Well they already have been penalized by the market. I realize that reflects expected future losses that haven't been realized yet, and that those losses in any given year probably won't be larger than their profits, but what's your point? This all reflects their assumption of a large contingent liability from this mess they created.
You are suggesting by repeatedly using the diminutive phrase "oh noes" that this isn't *real* punishment, but you fail to make clear what you think *real* punishment for a corporate entity is. Expropriation of assets by the Federal government and transfer to a state-owned oil corporation? Forced liquidation of the firm? I put forward the suggestion that these would all fail to create additional deterrence and principally have lots of negative consequences for people that weren't at fault in this incident.
I suggested in the first place that criminal negligence should be fully prosecuted against relevant individuals. I stand by that. Of course, many corporations would love to be able to operate under the corporate veil and never have the individuals involved assume responsibility for criminal behavior, but that doesn't mean we should let them and then run around tearing up corporate stock certificates, wringing our hands in fury, and trying in vain to make a legal fiction pay the price in a moral or retributive sense.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
No they have not been punished. The company remains practically unscathed. The notional stock value has not impacted their profits. They're still raking in money hand over fist. At their profit margins the cost of this spill won't make any serious dent. And even if it did, they'll pull an Exxon-Valdez and tie up any judgment in court for so long that they pay a fraction of what they should.
They have spent $1.25B. The market estimates that the total cost to BP of this fiasco will be around $100B. Now, you can argue the market is right or wrong, I personally don't think it will be quite that expensive to clean this mess up, but my point is that BP has accepted responsibility, is shelling out tons of cash, and expects to continue doing so for years to come and the most conservative estimates of that amount still are in the tens of billions of dollars.
The only real "punishment" you can inflict on a corporate entity is costing it cash and this is costing BP dearly. You can't beat its head into the ground, you can't embarrass it, you can't tickle its feet until it cries. Beyond money, which they have already agreed to spend a shit-pot of, if something criminal went on, you have to punish the individuals responsible for the criminal activity. The threat of jail time for negligence with other people's lives is much more effective as a deterrent for individuals engaging in illegal behavior than the any fines/forced reorganization/expropriation of assets on a corporate level will ever be.
Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet? (Score:2, Insightful)