Baby, You Can Fuel My Car
May 9th, 2007As you know, my wife and I don’t watch TV. We don’t have one in the house. But I remember somehow being exposed to those freaky pharmaceutical adds. Do you know the ones I mean? Pills hovering in purple fields with weird sunsets, and frightening, doped up women with Laura Bush smiles, etc…
The kind of commercials that make you think, “I don’t remember smoking crack this morning.”
Check out these BP commercials.
Via: Slate:
They’re spending about $35 million on this worldwide campaign for their service stations (or “retail network”). BP head of marketing Ann Hand acknowledges that the classic industry research says people choose stations mostly because of location or price, but adds that BP’s tracking studies show some brand awareness does exist. “This campaign is the next step,” she says. “Can we build more brand loyalty? Would you cut across traffic, or go a block out of your way?”
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The look suggests a sparkling clean gas-station experience. And along with the babies, it adds a warmth that’s missing from most gas-station imagery. My favorite touches: 1) The cranky, anthropomorphic gas pump down the block is wearing an evil-looking eyepatch. 2) Next to the fuel gauge, the babies’ car also has gauges indicating bottle and diaper status.
Finally, BP hopes to cement itself as the most “green” of the massive oil companies. To this end, the ad shows little windmills in the background. Also, BP service stations (there are more than 11,000 in the United States alone) have switched from plastic to paper bags at their convenience stores, and hand out trading cards with environmentally sensitive tips for kids (for instance: Use both sides of the paper when you color).
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Why do they need a pride boost? Well, there was that fatal refinery explosion. And then, last week, that thing where the BP CEO resigned amid a scandal involving a gay affair and lying to a judge. I’m sure the franchisees are stoked about the animated babies, though.
Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash
the funniest bp commercial has some sugar beet farmer holding up ONE plant and says “this plant will power your vehicle!”
equally ludicrous, check out any of ge’s ‘ecomagination’ ads at http://www.ecomagination.com. these companies’ ads’ reliance on gratuitous amounts of computer animation says a lot.
shell came out with a new ad campaign that i find frightening. in one fifteen-second spot, an adult and presumably his son sit at a diner table. the kid makes horrible noises slurping the last drops of his milkshake from the sides of the glass. the adult watches and develops a terrified/worried expression. then shell’s logo appears. maybe the kid’s slurping represents peak oil production’s diminishing returns, or maybe i’m just looking too hard.
BP stands for British Petroleum. It bought AMOCO, an American oil company, which had previously absorbed Standard Oil. This took place over several decades.
BP’s main competitor was Exxon. Neither had a reputation as do-gooders, and human rights activists were critical of both.
But when British Petroleum bought AMOCO, because the upper echelon managers got soft, decadent and corrupt, they decided to repackage themselves as environmentally friendly, to cash in on the progress myth of the 1990’s. They got rid of the old AMOCO torch logo stations, and started implementing the new, white, futuristic stations. The new logo was BP on a green and yellow flower. BP stood for “Beyond Petroleum.”
Of course, this was mostly marketing. While BP did have, at one point, the largest solar energy program in the world, it had only about 100 million invested in it, which is pocket change.
Solar energy is inimical to an oil company’s business model. I mean, the great thing about oil, is that, like crack cocaine, it is a drug that the addict must keep coming back to buy over and over and over and over again. With solar power? You sell some solar panels, and if people maintain them properly, and perhaps, improve on them, then they don’t need YOU anymore. This would be energy company suicide.
It was totally unrealistic of people to buy into BP’s marketing. Why do you think they are shilling vegetable fuels? Anything to keep people going to the service stations. Anything to keep people on the highways.
Think about all of the businesses that depend on the automobile and the mass transit system. All of those interests, lobbying, desperately, to sustain business models they have invested their lives in. Was it a prudent decision for them to do that? Think about Route 66. Everything along it is like a ghost town, if it still even exists.
The Interstate was initially designed because Eisenhower saw how Hitler had mobilized effectively with the Autobahn system. But Germany’s Autobahn grew up organically over an older road system in a smaller country, and it augmented a pre-existing rural/feudal system.
In America, the whole thing was built, and then the mono-crop system that came circa the Depression, benefited from it.
And service industries of motels, hotels, restaurants, malls, etc. sprung up like mushrooms around it, to profit off people who travel around the country.
Was all of this sustainable? It is looking to be not the case. Does this mean we will have a grim future? Not necessarily, but things could get ugly, and it will get uglier for more people than for less.
Your article also reminded me of the advent of “anti-anxiety” meds right after 9/11.
That comment about Laura Bush’s smile is right on. First couple of times I’d seen photos of her smiling away non-stop like that just seemed weird. Still does. Very Stepford Wife-ish. The Bush’s prolly got her all medicated out on some super-duper-won’t-put-you-in-a-stupor happy drug(Huxley’s Soma?) that only The Elites can get.
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent people.” -George Orwell
“Pharming”, the slang name for the abuse of widely advertised and available (“Just ask your doctor!”) prescription pharmaceutical drugs (such as Valium, Oxycontin, Zanex, Paxil, etc), is now the second most common drug abuse problem in the United States, according to the US DEA themselves.
The brain-dead, stepford wife-esque condition of many of the elites is now easily explained….better living through modern chemistry.