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Show 298 faces of those employed by bp and the face of bp itself in the form of the logo. Altogether, bp's post-Gulf advertisements have depended on images of healthy, pristine beaches, wildlife, and also employees, publics, and business owners to demonstrate that the disaster in the Gulf has subsided and bp is reliable. Whereas the $59 million apology campaign from Tony Hayward was met with scrutiny, these three advertisements are mundane and part of the visual and audible background. bp made significant efforts to regain its strong, environmentally friendly image by spending enormous amounts of money on advertising. In only the first four months of the spill it spent nearly $100 million on advertisements, which is about $6 million per week (Huffington Post, 2013). Since then bp has uploaded nearly 100 television advertisements on bp's official YouTube channel, and none of them have included Hayward's apology. These videos "show an evolution from disaster control to tourism advocacy" (para. 5), and in an annual shareholder's report from a recent annual general meeting, bp America's vice president for communications, Geoff Morrell, commented on the 2011 ad campaign: We made a commitment not only to restore the Gulf, but also to keep the American people informed of that effort…We've made significant strides over the past year and believe it's a good time to provide a progress report to the nation (bp Daily Securities Dashboard, p. 1) While Hayward's series of blunders worked against the moral character of bp, the 2011 "Voices of bp" campaign relied on images of the Gulf, the people, and the employees to evoke affects that supported claims that bp has not left the disaster it has created and that things are well on the road to recovery. There were certainly words, but the words by themselves make no sense and require the images to make them meaningful. I wonder, though, if words are actually used as supplements to these corporate images. Indeed, it is the "voices," the verbal commitments, the sounds of narrators, |
