AdVerve 46 - Social in the South

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Who’s taking Alabama social? The same crowd that brought Little Debbie digital. Luckie & Co.’s David Griner (@griner, TheSocialPath.com, AdFreak.com) joins us as we talk social in the Deep South, the meaning of transparency, the various merits of Alabama, and why you shouldn't tease BP employees on vacation.

It’s a ride. A social southern ride.

Linkage:
– Dale Peterson.
– Dr Pepper Moms.
– The Beach is Calling.
– BP employee parody.
– FedEx Al.

The men who never came back.

Lost among the dead pelicans is the human toll of the BP spill. Figured so much time has been spent looking at pics of dirty beaches, might as well take some time to at least know the lives of people doing jobs that bring us the everyday stuff we use. It’s something missing from so much of the reporting on BP, where the focus now is more on the reparations for the living and people’s livelihoods. There’s the story about Mike Williams as told on 60 Minutes, and there’s also a more extensive look on Esquire into the lives of the eleven who died on the rig and the challenges they faced.

(Image is from a NASA satellite showing the rig on fire—the little white dot in the lower right.)

Why BP will happen again.

“We must learn from this, so that it never happens again.” Isn’t that what everyone says after a tragedy? Of course, certain advancements in safety do come about after key learnings from many accidents. Recalls aside, that’s how the auto and airline industry got safer. But not everyone seems to learn. This is Mike Williams, one of the survivors of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. He was on 60 Minutes this week recounting his story of what happened. It confirms a lot of what I heard within days of the explosion, and some things I suspected in the following weeks. Focus on animals covered in oil, lost tourist dollars and rage tees all you want, but until you solve the root problem that these things KEEP coming back to, accidents aren’t a question of if, but when: rushed schedules and deadlines combined with lapses in safety procedures.

Or they wear nothing at all.

Where do I start.

I was scanning an old ad for English Leather that I saw with Doug Flutie (ever the face of the brand), and I thought, hmm, let me see what the brand is up to. People, it’s not pretty. A little background, if I might.

You can’t talk about it without also mentioning Old Spice. For years, both brands were in the exact same league. When it came time to pick a cologne for guys, they were the lesser of two evils. While Old Spice has obviously grown beyond sea captains and pea coats to offer bodywash products, English Leather is still soap on a rope. (Insert jokes at will.)

But wait, there’s more.

Old Spice broke out of the category by parodying the category. Along with Dos Equis Most Interesting Man, both brands have shown how to kill it when it comes to mocking the notion of what real men are. Aqua Velva, English Leather and the rest must though just be content with owning, well, I’m not sure, not after you see the English Leather website.

Touch the wood?

Going for the subtly of Axe much? I appreciate the attempt at the demo upgrade from father and son, but a BP control room has better Photoshop work.

I know Old Spice is getting all the glory now, but it’s not even close on Facebook. As in, nearly 794,000 to 414 close. Twitter’s not much better, 105,000+ to, well, let’s just say, when you follow more people than follow you by a nearly 4:1 ratio, they tend to call that a problem in social media circles. The profile though? Smells of win:

“Your wingman for over 40 years. Or, said another way - ideal for Cougar Hunting. Just ask her if she remembers All My Men Wear English Leather.”

You had me at cougar wingman. Old English, help us, help you.

BP—your quiet achiever.

Piling on, sure, BUT THAT’S WHAT WE DO HERE. Do you love the delivery of *quiet achiever* though? I do.

Help the Gulf—drink Pepsi.

I kid... such a kidder. After listening To Drew Brees promote ideas to help the Gulf Pepsi’s Refresh Project with some football-heavy copy, I think people are less frustrated in what they can do for the Gulf and are frustrated waiting on what BP is going to do. Worthwhile cause and some well-meaning ideas. Check it out.

Rebranding BP. Why?

Dealers apparently are taking to the idea of rebranding as a solution to stem the growing resentment customers feel towards parent company BP. Basically, it’s a matter of sorry about the Gulf, but we’ve got a business to run. Since the spill, the average dealer’s sales are down 500 gallons a day due to recent protests, which translates to about $40K a month based on the current national average of $2.73 a gallon.

There’s also been suggestions for BP to just lower its gas prices to keep existing customers while attracting others, but really, how much would they need to lower them? Just dropping it .02¢ seems like a waste. I can get a few pennies off myself just by going up the street. If I’m driving around looking to save, it better be in the dime range or better.

Factor in 11 dead oil rig workers and a brand trying to lure customers back, what’s that worth? .50¢ off a gallon? A dollar?

Still, tempting as it is to hate BP, it’s not the dealer’s fault. Even though gas yields the highest output from a barrel of oil, dealers don’t make a lot per gallon, somewhere in the 3-5% range. If a price cut were to occur, no dealer would be able to support it without significant financial support from the home office.

So is rebranding the answer?

Here’s why it isn’t. A new logo is as much a long-term fix as it is a short-term one—and that’s with your garden variety brand where maybe you want to freshen up a stale brand. Hello Burberry, Hello UPS.

But then you take a step down when you apply the practice to brands who don’t know who they are as a company, or who may have customer service issues. Hello AOL, hello Comcast.

You can also rebrand after a major tragedy. Hello ValuJet, hello AirTran.

However, you really crash and burn if you try it after doing something so heinous as to make an entire country hate you. Hello cover-up, hello BP.

Then there’s the practical aspects of a rebrand. This assumes you could get designs created, approved and implemented in the field quickly enough to affect that change in perception you so desperately need. Conservatively, we’re talking two months minimum—and that’s starting today.* That’s trucks, pumps, cups, signs and whatever else. Then there’s the inevitable ad campaign required to help launch it all.

Meanwhile, everyone knows you’re rebranding, so forget about making a splash as this *new* gas on the scene. No matter what look you come up with, people will still remember what you did to those poor turtles. Compared to the live feed of an underwater gusher, a TV spot with a shiny happy family pulling into a new BP XYZ station might not play so well.

If you thought the Chevy Tahoe parodies made GM cringe? This is nothing. Assuming you did rebrand though, where do you draw the line with it?

Is it just for BP stations? What about their other brands Amoco, Arco and Thrifty? I’m sure the station owners would love any name besides BP right now, but I wonder how many people protesting them are filling up at Amoco without knowing who really owns the company. The dealers wanting to go back to the Amoco name are being short-sighted because people will find out eventually. Oops, too late.

As for the long-term, the only advantage to rebranding that I can see is that customers in a few years may not be aware of what went on now. If you look at Exxon after the Valdez spill, it took them about 15 years to exit the retail business—and that’s without changing their look or name. During that time, they sold off many of their stores to Valero, but continued to operate under their Exxon-Mobil name.

Even after they got out of retail completely in 2005, they still leased the Mobil name. Why rebrand when you can wait out the protests? In BP’s case, nobody is talking about selling off their retail business—yet. I mentioned AirTran, but there at least, the new owners were committed to improving the safety violations that plagued ValuJet.

With BP’s long history of spills and violations though, this is either the final straw, or more likely just one more incident they’ll have no trouble ignoring the outcry over.

And if they have no problem doing that, why would they ever see the need to rebrand?

(Image.)

*I don’t know many printers that would turn down the amount of work that this would require if BP dangled enough cash. You can bet the P.O. from the agency would simply say ‘Whatever it costs.’

Meet the new boss, same as...

Wow. Where do you start. One thing I thought BP would’ve gotten by now about damage control is to simply stop putting its foot in its mouth and just apologize every time a mic is around. But new CEO Robert Dudley never got that email. Citing BP’s “Unprecedented corporate response,” as well as the things on the bucket list that are in “BP’s long-term interest,” do they get it yet? Unprecedented? Like, here’s an atta’ boy? The spill was unprecedented, so the response had better be too. Right now, the U.S. doesn’t want to hear anything other than the company is putting their interests first, not BP’s. But wait, there’s more: “We’re going to learn from this accident... We’re gonna change many things in BP... The industry is going to learn a lot for it.” And a passerby after hearing the news: “BP wasn’t always a horrible company.” Did I already say wow?

So that it never happens again, right? Might want to check that history.

Red tape 2.0

I don’t mean to bug ya’, but one of the things we talked about on the Beancast this week had to do with the effectiveness of celebrity campaigns on relief efforts. I mentioned a story about Sean Penn in Haiti and his relief efforts he founded with jphro.org, and how he seemed to be flying under the radar. CNN coverage is not under the radar of course, but with disasters, people tend to forget about them soon after the initial outcry. Then it’s apathy 2.0 until the next one happens.

With Penn, you might think great, another celebrity paying lip service, but he’s been living there soon after the earthquake hit and put up his own money to fund efforts. Say what you will but that’s more than I did, by far. He talks about something though facing a lot of NGOs in disaster areas that I heard in an old All Things Considered, in that there’s almost always a lack of central control that hampers efforts.*

That’s an earthquake though, and hard to predict in the way we can forecast a few days out as we do with a hurricane. Except there’s one key difference with relief efforts for oil spills or other man-made disasters: While we focus on the effects of the event after it happens, relief telethons and celebrity videos don’t address the root cause leading up to the event.

(Granted, it might be a stretch to say red tape plays a part in causing man-made disasters, but as the Gulf story has shown, it certainly plays a part in the clean-up effort.)

However, if I had to make that connection, the red tape here could be considered the issues of safety procedures, rushed deadlines and improperly operating equipment which seemed to have all played their part. If you wanna help clean up pelicans, fine. Just remember that there was a human toll: 11 rig workers and one fisherman in the subsequent clean-up.

More importantly, look at all ongoing drilling now and immediately recheck safety procedures. (BP is no friend of OSHA, and their sister rig Deepwater Nautilus is like your neighbor’s dog with a history of breaking free. They also want to start a new one off Libya.)

And we’re focused on t-shirts.

Too often you hear the phrase “so it never happens again” tacked on at the end of a story about a tragic event or disaster, but it’s government agencies and the companies themselves that can have the biggest impact on that statement—ahead of time.

*I can’t find the story now, but the point of the piece was that NGOs come in, do what they can, but then due to things beyond their control, get pulled out, leaving behind a critical shortage of doctors to help people.

“Visit Pensacola and watch BP workers hard at... play?”

I’m all for parody, but ouch Pensacola. Not sure the F-U to BP works. Whether they’re making light of how clean their beaches are or BP’s cleanup effort, seems like the workers in real life that this spot takes a shot at are only locals hired by BP. Why go after them.

F*CK PROFITS BEFORE PELICANS.

“I’m Tweeting the fuck out of this!” Enjoy some good-old fashioned ventalicious anger while helping Gulf relief efforts. Created by Nate Guidas and Luke Montgomery, they drop F-bombs—you drop $13 on a sexy tee at Unf--thegulf.com. Almost 405 from each shirt ($5) goes to the Gulf, and you also get to vote on which charity gets the money. (There’s also angry buttons.) Twitter? Facebook? Check! Keep the pressure on kids, because the greatest enemy of any movement is apathy. Sorry, *fucking* apathy.

(Via.)

AdVerve 40 - Harry Webber Redux

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The Man™ is back. Turns out he was just getting started last time. Anybody spared? DON’T BLAME HARRY. It’s our fault because we put him up to it. Harry opens with a story about the origins of the CBS logo and the behind the scenes skullduggery. (Well, for advertising it’s skullduggery at least.) Then we hit up Apartment living, Crooklyn style, listen in on a few calls with friend of the show Mel Gibson.

Since Harry actually knows Mel, he confirms a few of the things you already suspect about him, plus a few you didn’t. Who’s next? Oh yeah. Two guys named Jobs & Gates. BP and Obama then get their asses handed to them while Denzel gets mad love as we break down religiosity in The Book of Eli.*

YOU WANT MORE? Oliver North even shows up.

Miss this episode at your own risky business.

Subscribe via iTunes:

*MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. Haven’t seen the movie yet? Then skip past 50:27 and go right to 01:10:31.

Topics:

00:00 – Intro/The CBS story
08:36 – Adterns
12:15 – Microsoft
27:01 – Mel Gibson and race ftw
37:33 – BP
40:23 – Obama’s turn
50:27 – The Book of Denzel
01:10:31 – Oliver North: domain typo king
01:19:21 – #saatchiLa
01:21:32 – Wrap

Linkage:

• Book of Eli.
• The Road.
• Email HARRYWEBBERKNOWS [at] GMAIL [dot] COM.
  

Send questions or comments to advervepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. You can also leave a review.

When it rains...

I need a sub-directory to list all of BP’s gaffes. Now there’s seepage from the cap, and seepage from bad Photoshop work. The control room shot above? Look closer at the three screens to the right of center mah pixel-lovin readers. Things aren’t as they seem in some of the best retouching work this side of a Polish Microsoft site. That image actually ended up like this. (The two words on the far left are what really freak me out for some reason: Microsoft Excel.) BP though claims they had someone retouch in the shots because the screens in question didn’t have the cameras on at the time. Okay, makes sense, and I have no doubt there’s a lot of good people at the grunt level trying to fix this, but when you have zero room to maneuver in the court of public opinion, maybe spend less on TV ads and more on freelancers who know Photoshop? (Look how twisted this just got: We’re pissed because their Photoshop was bad, not that they tried to cover it up.) Regardless, BP says the original shot should be back in place tonight.

Probably not a good idea to mention deadlines, now that I think of it.

(Story: Washington Post via, via.)

Any PR is...

Even though BP has removed the cap for complete oil Gulf flowage and further destruction of their rep, the return of Evil Mel part II may have just moved him ahead in the brand beyond repair category. WHAT SAY YOU? (Clip NSFW.)

Who’s rep is damaged the most?
	BP
	Tiger Woods
	LeBron
	Mel Gibson

BP: Your First Amendment partner.

I’ll get back to lawyer ads later, but after seeing the latest move in the Gulf to control the media by restricting access, it makes you ask just what country you’re living in. That’s not me going all rogue political activist at the end of a long 4th of July weekend, but at some point, if you work for a brand that knowingly supports the setting aside of the First Amendment, you seriously have to ask yourself if the check is worth it. I understand the Coast Guard’s concerns over safety by possibly interfering with workers, or even if this was an issue of national security, but this doesn’t appear to be the case.

The human and wildlife toll is still the worst part of this, but the collateral damage now extends to the media. The new policy means they won’t be able to fully cover what’s going on because they have to stay back at least 65’ from ships or workers on the beach (and that’s down from 300’ they initially wanted). Grainy pictures from zoom lenses are fine for covering vacationing celebs, but for getting at the real story? Not quite. Unless reporters in Zodiacs were buzzing oil booms, blocking national media only works for so long. Eventually, people upload the truth to YouTube, or contractors hired to handle clean-up share stories of what’s going on despite fears of losing the only work they have.

Why help BP block what’s going to come out anyway?

Blow it up.

Don’t worry, more oily pics to come, but for now, here’s a little different perspective on the BP Gulf leak from someone who would know what President Obama’s priorities should be.

But wait, there’s more...

– Garden beats for mom.
– Pranking Google StreetView.
– Never fails to cringe.
– Conan the musical.
– Brother from another BP.
– Fighting for WWII.
– .xxx marks the spot.
– You can call him Al.
– 7 ballsy pranks that worked.
– The Japanese whiskey.
– Vulcans vs. Apes. (Via.)
– The coolest science class I never had.

“When a warm breeze blows in from the Gulf, you’ll definitely notice.”

Yeah, I bet. It’ll be the fires from the burning oil. Not to beat the shit out of local tourism efforts in Florida, I’m not. They have a huge challenge to keep the crowds coming this summer. This was going to be more about contextual sadness than anything because I saw this ad while getting the car’s oil changed today. (Ironic ftw.) It follows the theme of their site, and The Dali was interesting too, even though that water looks way too clean for BP’s liking. Anyway, taglines and such are written long before safety procedures and concerns take a backseat to profits, so this unfortunate yet timely ad catches the St. Pete Clearwater crew off-guard with some cringe-worthy wordplay.

Your weekend oil update.

Boston.com with yet more stunning photography of this mess. What I’m seeing in the comments there and on other websites though is a sentiment about the spill that is puzzling. Those speaking out more and more against deep sea drilling are blaming liberalism for it? Double hmmm. As BP’s PR effort that I first mentioned here now gets a disgusting “kudos” from some, we should be hating the game (oil) and not the playa so much.

Before the election, a lot of the rhetoric was focused on ending dependence on foreign oil. If they really meant it, what I thought it should’ve always been though was ending a dependence on oil in general. Did this spill have to happen for that change in the message to occur? It’s a moot point though if there isn’t a bigger effort to convert to alternative forms of energy after this. Coming up with safer ways to continue using the ones we have only prolongs that.

A little perspective though on deep sea drilling and why hating the game should be the focus. Thanks to BP, the second largest oil spill in American history is now the Exxon Valdez.

It ran aground on a reef.

What’s the going rate for a species.

What’s a few lousy turtles. Do disasters now just seem worse because we have so many ways to get the word out about what’s happening? Probably. I have to think collateral damage has always occurred in manmade or natural disasters; we just weren’t as aware. It’s the kind of thing the Drill Baby Drill crowd dismisses as the price we have to pay if we want to keep on producing as a nation, yah? I haven’t heard BP’s side of this though, but just hearing the word “endangered” reminds you how sinister it all is. (The turtle described is the Kemp’s Ridley, the most endangered of all turtles.)