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.

Re:Can't Even Boycott the Bastards

[batquux]

What can I do?

Go to google, search for 'oil spill', and click on all the ads. Each click costs them money, and I'm sure they're bidding high for placement.

Surprisingly Competant for an Evil Villain

[eldavojohn]

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 [newsweek.com] 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 [washingtonpost.com] gets to the bottom of that.

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

[RivenAleem]

Now what we need is a press release from Google saying that all revenue generated from the BP add goes towards helping clean the spillage.

Then we can just sit back while BP goes bankrupt (though I suspect there's an upper limit to the cost of the add...)

Re:Who Cares

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Can't Even Boycott the Bastards

[AdmiralXyz]

You could ask the owner of the local gas station to switch to a new franchise. Most of those places are run like fast-food chains: Joe Citizen signs a multi-year renewable contract with the Company X in which he gets to use their branding, in exchange for buying gasoline from them and forking over some percentage of his revenue. Abandoning the contract early would probably cost the owner a great deal of money, though, and those guys are struggling enough as it is with the wild fluctuation in gas prices (the more it changes, the worse off they are). It would all depend on just how angry he was at BP.

Not pretty, but convincing enough of them to switch would be the real way to harm BP. Just boycotting BP stations is pretty much useless.

Re:It may seem egregious and offensive

[LWATCDR]

I hate to even ask but have you gone to the site they linked to their ad? http://www.bp.com/bodycopyarticle.do?categoryId=1&contentId=7052055&nicam=USCSBaselineCrisis&nisrc=Google&nigrp=Non_Branded_Crisis_Management-_General&niadv=General&nipkw=oil_spill [bp.com]
It isn't a terrible site. It is clearly marked as a BP site as well.
No Astroturfing just a site about what they are doing.
Totally expected and frankly people would be screaming if they had not done it.
They also have live feeds from the ROVs which seems pretty cool
This is so not a story but hey what do you expect?

Its pretty straightforward actually

[retardpicnic]

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.

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[PhilHibbs]

How exactly can the PR and marketing department assist a mile underwater? Answer, they can't. BP has to survive as a company in order to be able to fix the problem and make amends. They could go bust, but how would that help anyone?

Re:Who Cares

[UnknowingFool]

While both incidents were unfortunate, I'd have to put BP in a different class than Exxon and Union Carbide. For the most part the two companies haven't had many major disasters or accidents in their long history. BP on the other hand have had 2 other major incidents [wikipedia.org] in the last 5 years. Over the last 3 years, BP has recorded 760 OSHA safety violations [thedailyshow.com]. Their competitors:

• Sunoco, 8
• Conoco-Phillips, 8
• Citgo, 2
• Exxon, 1

In order words, BP has almost 40x the incidents than all their competitors combined.

Re:have they bought "Beyond Pitiful" yet?

[dominious]

Listen. Yesterday i did type "oil spill" in google search and got into the bp website, where i found that they have a suggestions page and a volunteer page and I could actually participate for solving this problem. I think it is much more helpful for everyone if bp handles these search terms.

Or do you prefer to get a massive amount of hate webpages from bloggers that would actually do no difference to the actual problem?