BP's Oil Spill PR Commercials

I'm not particularly pleased with BP these days. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has recently been stopped but that certainly doesn't undo the damage which has already been done, not to mention the lives which have already been lost as a result of the explosion which began this environmental disaster. I'm pretty confident in saying most Americans would probably agree with me.

BP, aware of the public relations nightmare they've unleashed upon themselves, has released a series of PR commercials, costing millions, in order to regain favor with the American people. In these commercials, BP has featured it's CEO delivering scripted apologies and promising to "make this right." More recently, the commercials have featured American BP employees such as the head of BP's oil spill cleanup telling us statistics on how much oil the company has already cleaned up and that they're going to be around for the remainder of the cleanup to "see this thing to the end."

I can't speak for the rest of America but I'm not only unimpressed with these PR commercials, I find them downright patronizing and offensive. The commercials' weak attempt to relate to us through the use of fellow Americans who also "care about the Gulf" are transparent and don't seem sincere. More importantly, thousands of people's lives have been affected by the oil spill in the Gulf. There are a lot of businesses suffering as a result of BP's mistake. Yes, a fund has been established to reimburse these businesses and individuals for their losses but let's face it; Not everyone is going to be fully compensated. To me, this makes BP's PR commercials all the more infuriating.

With so many affected by the spill still out of work or losing business, is now really the time for BP to try and rebuild their own image? Perhaps the millions spent on their commercials seem negligible compared to the cleanup costs but that's a little more money that could be used to reimburse businesses or contributing to cleaning up the oil instead of BP cleaning up their image image.