Bill Huey, Strategic Communications, Atlanta (6/10):
Soon BP will have as many PR firms as AIG after the crash. Always a bad sign.
Veep (6/10):
A complete uphill climb, but this makes sense. Brunswick is a great firm but their experience dealing with a crisis that permeates to the consumer level has got to be limited. They're known for business and financial accounts. Ogilvy's team knows social and digital media -- and I say that as a direct competitor with them.
Anonymous (6/10):
I would like to see the crisis become a work in progress. Glad to see the agency of choice come around to provide relief, assistance, and up front commentary rather than satire. Anyone who has come through crisis knows what gossip brings to the table: "little crumbs" of information spread thin.
Ron Levy (6/10):
Ogilvy has the PR equivalents of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and SOMEBODY should have the nerve to push BP into showing the public the key evidence we're not seeing yet in the newspapers and on TV:
1. PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE showing that the blowout protector--which failed to protect against blowout--was made not by BP but by a copany now quietly negotiating over how much in damages is should pay.
2. DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE showing that the well is owned not by BP but by Transocean.
3. EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE that it was BP employees --not employees of the blowout protector maker nor employees of Transocean--who got injured by the explosion.
4. EXPERT TESTIMONEY EVIDENCE--from deans of top law schools--that BP has been doing way more than legally required since (a) the trouble was caused by others, and (b) the corporation that operated the well is a separate company from BP and just as you and I are not liable for the possible obligations of corporations in which we own stock, neither is BP liable for subsidiary corporations in which BP owns the stock.
It's not stupidity nor a fad that gets millions of American companies to incorporate, it's a desire to make stockholders in those companies not liable, and if they are not then neither is the stockholder of the oil well operating company. The TRUTH needs to be presented for BP.
Ogilvy and some of the other heavy hitters BP has must persuade BP that for the sake of public sqfety and BP's survival, BP should show a PHOTO from an ad or brochure showing the manufacturer's name stamped on the blowout protector, plus photocopies of ad and brochure copy telling what BP and other oil companies relied on--that the blowout protector would protect. Somewhere there are documents that show who really owns that well.
You could make a case--not the only case but a good case--that BP is a VICTIM like the rest of us, not the perpetrator. Nearly all large companies are sued repeatedly--sometimes by individuals and sometimes by other large companies--because a product didn't work the way it was supposed to according to the ads and trade literature. Can anyone doubt tht the blowout protector didn't work the way it was supposed to?
It's time for a congressman from a BP district to propose, and this is easy to arrange, a congressional investigation of firms that make devices supposed to prevent blowouts and prevent our home furnaces from blowing up and prevent other disasters that kills tens of thousads of people every year.
Lightning rods should protect against lightning, the circuit breakers in our homes should break circuits when necessary so we and our families don't die in home fires, and blowout protectors should protect against blowout. It's time for BP to make the case that "we're a victim just as you are, and we're made as hell just as you have a right to be made as hell, and we hope for government action just as millions of Americans do so this will be avoided in the future."
Bill Huey, Strategic Communications, Atlanta (6/10):
BP is a victim, Ron? Try telling that to the pelicans and the sea turtles.
Without going too heavily into the facts or the law surrounding this case, I'd say that both are running heavily against BP.
Of course, as numerous commentators have pointed out, the company has the resources to litigate this for decades, treating litigation and fines as just another cost of doing business.
Now let's consider the consequences if everyone did that: A fouled planet run by corporations that are legally immune because of concessions made many years ago. Not a very cheering thought, or one likely to uplift the CSR community.
Ron Levy (6/11):
In reply to Huey:
Activists can be like an attractive woman with a most unattractive disease.
Activists often want the government to take money from a company in the news like BP or Walmart--or even from welfare recipients living with children in poverty but "not people like us" because of color and bad schooling-and give the money to us.
But spending a little more to educate poor people may mean spending a lot less to jail them, and we may be better off not to covet our neighbor's ass nor our corporations' assets.
We can see from the news stories about BP that many people are inclined to presume not innocence but guilt. But it can be unwise to bite either the hand that feeds us or the hands that give us oil and pharmaceuticals and chemicals we need for our safety.
It's tempting to root for the plaintiffs who sue doctors, hospitals, drug compaies and others--hoping plaintiffs get big awards and feel touchingly grateful like American Idol winners. But--and here's the "unattractive disease" part--WE have to pay those awards in the form of higher prices and higher insurance premiums.
Unlike our government, oil companies can't just print money. So if companies need more insurance and have to pay more for insurance, we'll have to pay higher prices.
This is why many a PR firm guides clients into CSR projects like volunteering to teach in a great media studies program like Hunter's or donating money or a building to someplace like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Such corporate good deeds create reputational armor because media and the public tend to give known corporate good guys the benefit of the doubt. The jungle law of PR is that the strong tend to attack the weak. Reputational weakness makes acgtivists aroused. So cutting down on corporate good guy expenses is like messing with an attractive woman who has an unattrractive disease.
Weakness can lead to worse.
Thinkman2 (6/11):
Excuse me, but what is Ron talking about?
Veep (6/11):
Bill Huey comments on this Web site = good stuff.
Grizzled veteran (6/11):
Consumer crisis comms expertise on board -- SIX WEEKS after the incident began. Wow. If BP gets any smarter, they'll implode. Early on, they bring on a financial/corporate crisis firm. Which tells you precisely how they viewed the situation. And they were 100% wrong -- it's the consumer wrath that's now driving the politicians, not the other way around. Tone deaf. CEO with a monumental ego who either didn't GET any good counsel or didn't take it or didn't even seek it. It's frustrating -- after J&J, after Exxon, after Enron, after the Vatican, after HOW MANY major crises that have been document and dissected . . . . and we still have CEOs and companies with "corporate communications" staff who can't do Crisis PR 101. If PRSA needs a cause, they should quit obsesssing about APR and work on this. |