The Deepwater Horizon accident not only killed 11 people but the oil spill is (up to now) the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the second largest oil spill in the history of the United States and the third largest ever. Thus whatever way you look at it is a calamitous disaster. However, the precise amount of spilled oil is actually not very well known and lower estimates are still considerably below estimates for a rather similar incident from around 1980, the Ixtoc I spill. I had personally never even heard of that incident. Not only did it take place 25 years ago, but I fear that an even more important reason is that it took place in Mexican waters. 

The mere fact that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened in US waters is already enough to make it a major media event.  Of course depending on the media you get a different picture. The liberal (according to US standards) Washington Post seems content with showing pictures of slicked marshes and communities sticking together The so called “fair and balanced” fox news (heavily biased towards the conservative wing of the republicans and strongly ideologic by European standards, but the most popular source of information in the US none the less) seems above all determined to bash Obama and keep their viewers in favor of drilling.  Rush Limbaugh, influential radio host and self proclaimed poster boy of the “make no prisoners” style American right wing has even suggested that the explosion might be due to eco-terrorism from environmentalists, and that the ocean can handle it because the oil is all natural.

BP and the Media

Even the media deeply connected with Big Oil though are critical of BP and Tony Hayward the CEO of BP however. Communication wise, BP is not in an easy situation for a number of reasons.

• First and foremost, BP is the main contractor and it showed negligence, bordering on the criminal. According to this and this article in the New York Times they have consistently chosen cheaper, more riskier solutions and failed to take notice of all signs that something is wrong, pushing through to catch up with delays that cost half a million dollar a day just for renting the oil platform. The actual E-mails seem of the “it seems to work, lets not fuss about it more than necessary” kind. This is actually normal behaviour for engineers worrying over far fetched risks which they try to reduce even further, but clearly in this case they knew they were dealing with a “crazy well” and that they worried that they “flipped design parameters to the point [of] getting nervous” . Both BP and Transocean were informed that one of the control pods on the Blow Out Preventer was leaking, but rather than repairing the pod, they switched on the spare control pod. Once the oil was gushing out, BP had to improvise in building a cap to stem the flow, which failed because of methane rich water ice (hydrate) that formed from the natural gas flowing out. This is a well understood phenomenon that is the due to the pressure and temperature at these depth and is some they something they could and should have been aware of. The top-kill operation (pumping heavy mud into the well) also failed for reasons that are less clear, but that seem to suggest that the poorly made well is leaking. Last not least BP had to up the estimates of the amount of oil being spilled from 5000 to 50000 barrels a day. Only the strongest of reality distortion fields can argue all that away and restore confidence. 

• Second, BP is a British company. The two main subcontractors deeply involved in this drama, Halliburton and Transocean are American companies, or at least used to be American before they set up shop in Dubai and Switzerland to evade taxes. Halliburton provided the cement casing for the oil well which seems to be not properly sealing the well. On the other hand the infamous Blow Out Preventer that was supposed to cut of the well but didn’t, was owned and operated by Transocean. In any case, for the US media, a foreign firm is an easier pick. Being British also means that it is easier to put political pressure on the firm by the Obama administration because there are less political allies. Even without a clear legal basis but backed by a strong public opinion the US government managed to press BP into agreeing to a 20 billion dollar (20 000 000 000 $) fund to pay damages (without a cap on total liabilities) shows the pressure this has created (see also what happened to congressman Barton (rep) critizing the administration for that reason and his subsequent fate  ). 

• Third, BP is a high profile company whose brand and logo are immediately recognized because they directly sell gas to consumers. On the other hand Halliburton and Transocean are specialized companies providing service to the oil industry. Transocean specializes in operating oil platforms in particular deep sea oil platforms like the Deepwater Horizon. Halliburton provides everything imaginable for the oil industry and then some. It is also a secretive, highly controversial company, that some consider a state in the state. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, in between his jobs as secretary of defense and as the most influential vice president in history. The company is particularly notorious for the way it got highly lucrative contracts in Iraq for anything from drilling wells, to building barracks for the US army, to running armed private security services, essentially an army of mercenaries. Halliburton, Cheney and the oil industry in general (including BP) are also highly influential in politics, especially in the Republican party and its politically allied media like “Fox news”.  (Side note for Dutch readers: Halliburton and Kellog Brown Root Energy Sevices (a subsidiary of Halliburton) own a whole slew of BV’s in the Netherlands including such inconspicuous ones as the Hobbymarkt Delft BV owned by Halliburton Investments BV).

• Fourth, BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward is a very British, stiff upperlip geology PhD, rather than an American PR trained business school graduate. To be sure, the man is very well paid (4 million pound last year), makes business deals with former KGB (or GRU) agents in Russia,  and has Anne Womack Kolton, a former public relations manager of the US dept of Energy and (there we are again!) Dick Cheney, as his PR manager. His soft spoken unemotional image, smiling burdened but slightly condescending may well be a studied pose to divert the flak. But then it may not. He claims not having been involved in decision making in the events leading to the accident, which is what you expect for a CEO of a company drilling hundreds of wells per year, and he wants to wait for the result of investigations before making a public statement on the cause of the accident. That both sounds reasonable but of course it can also be seen as a sign of arrogance, a lack of sensibility and an attempt to limit financial liabilities. He also said that he wanted his life back and spend a weekend with his family after weeks of crisis which one can understand from human point of view. To say that in public and watch your own sailing yacht in a race (called the J.P. Morgan Asset management race to add insult to injury) in the midst of a crisis is of course interpreted as another sign of living in a world of privileged disdain. Likewise he has said that people on the clean up team which felt sick might well have had food poisoning because you have to be dead careful with epidemics and hygiene with lots of people in a tent camp in subtropical conditions. He may well be right but of course it is also interpreted as downplaying the hazards of oil and dispersant toxicity and a lack of interest for the exposure risks of cleanup workers and the communities around the Gulf.  It is no surprise then, that day to day management of the Gulf spill is now transferred to Robert Dudley, an American chemical engineer annex PR trained business school graduate that formerly was in charge of TNK-BP a joint venture with Russian oligarchs.

• Finally, BP has at least two very different audiences to reach. On the one hand there is American public opinion. This is very much the audience that politics and most of the media are trying to influence. On the other hand there are investors and shareholders, i.e. the financial world which for BP is centred around the London stock market. The public opinion battle is not looking good for BP:Figure 1 (source BrandIndex through Felix Salmon/Reuters blog). The brandindex is percentage of people that heard something positive minus percentage that heard something negative about brand in past month.

In addition BP’s share prices have fallen dramatically and it is likely that a good part of the leverage from US government on BP comes from the influence on share prices that mobilizing public opinion has. The stock prices are not looking good either.Figure 2 (Source Yahoo finance UK).  BP share prices 22/06/2009 to 22/06/2010

Crossmedial communication

What is the cross medial communication strategy that has been chosen to contain the damage? To analyse this, we need to determine the message or messages that is/are being communicated, the way different parties use the media and the way these media interact.

In all three cases, but especially in the BP case, there seem to be two conflicting messages for which a communication strategy is used:

• We take our share of the responsibility.
• We cap liability.

The two messages are roughly the messages directed at public opinion and at investors. Responsibility and liability are related, but quite different concepts: responsibility is about accepting guilt and accepting moral obligations that follow from that guilt, whereas liability is about financial burdens following from legal obligations. In particular, the latter is dependent on contracts, regulations, legal procedures to establish wrongdoings and insurance policies. In this high profile case liability will also heavily depend on the result of negotiations with the government.

In the case of Halliburton and Transocean media usage is easy. The message strategy is keep as low a profile as possible, and keep out of the media. This strategy is particularly clear for Halliburton. As a non scientific test, if you google “Halliburton Deepwater Horizon” you get 758.000 hits with the top one being an analysis of a consultant on a Halliburton press release on the disaster.  You get 4.780.000 hits if you do the same with Transocean with the top one leading to the specs of the drilling platform. For BP you get 8.470.000 hits with the top one being a Wikipedia article on the spill, immediately followed by the BP website, news and video’s. I could not even do the same test with Tony Hayward and his American peers because I haven’t even come across the names of his peers. At the homepage of the Halliburton website you will find not a single reference to the Deepwater Horizon incident.  If you click on deep water, Gulf of Mexico, you will find prose like

The complexity of the challenges presented by Miocene and Lower Tertiary trends, coupled with the Salt Canopy in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, are immense. Success in these deepwater environments calls for a service company with reliable and proven technology, …..

In other words they make belief that the whole situation does not even exist or at least that they have nothing to do with it. Only when digging through press releases you will find notices of conference calls with investors on the incident.
The Transocean website does reference the incident and the loss of lives of its employees, it has links to the reactions that Transocean representatives gave to congress, and has news on the financial impact of the loss of their platform and their insurance policies. In any case, from a cross medial perspective, by choosing not to communicate through media addressing public media (be they mass media, the internet or social media) they avoid the costly and risky cross speak on the media addressing investors.

BP

As explained above, the BP case is more complex. To bridge the conflict between the two conflicting messages, they created subtexts that are more positive, more commensurate and which allow stressing different aspects to different parties.  I emphasize parts that can be used as a spin to investors.

1. We take our share of the responsibility 
2. We have earmarked specific funds 
3. We were compliant with regulations
4. Pending investigations giving hard engineering data we cannot draw conclusions
5. We use all our engineering skills and resources to limit the damage
6. We reserve the right to hold other parties liable for the damage.

The media that BP are using are much more diverse too. I will list the following, together with my superficial impression of what was emphasized most. I also indicated whether BP was controlling the way the message is distributed to its audience.

Hayward as the face of BP regularly appears on interviews and media appearances, for example on the beach.  Here the media expect him to show emotional grief and pain. As we discussed above Haywards undercooled reactions have not gone down very well.

Congressional hearings are in some sense comparable to a life performance played out by members of congress and the interrogated in this case mr. Howard. It has a direct audience as the legislators are important in what will happen with company. At least as important though, is that its covered life by the mass media so that the whole country is listening to mr. Haywards and watching his demeanor. The media (and congressmen seeking reelection!) are more than willing to show him being grilled by congressmen for being evasive and answering “I can’t remember” with a British accent. Some of the questions he gets are actually about statements he made in the media. On the other hand, Hayward uses the hearings as a podium for his messages: taking its part of the responsibility, being grieved and creating a fund for legitimate claims but also not wanting to draw conclusions pending investigations, stressing that BP doing its best to cleanup and control the well. Hayward has also answered questions in terms that have a strong scientific or engineering flavor, for example stating in congressional hearings that integrity ratings were of “of the order of ten to the minus five, ten to the minus six”. Thus the hearings are very much a crossmedial event,  by design with very high stakes.

The message that BP sends to investors seems in some sense the most frank, detailing which part of the costs are going to be paid when, and also making clear that the 20 billion fund neither includes fines, nor is a cap on liability,. They also explain that the money in the fund will be continuing to make money for them! Most interestingly, they explains why they came up with this fund while their legal maximal liability is limited to 75 million: it allows them to do further constructive talks with the US government, which is absolutely essential for their US operations, by providing clarity for the people on the gulf which are most directly hit by the pollution. Thus while it may be a stretch to think of money as a medium, in this case clearly money talks.

Finally there are the media that are under the control of BP, and are thus highly accessible to BP.  The clearest picture arises when you look at the BP website which is of course under their own control. The homepage is now completely dominated by the Gulf spill and is the first google hit for with a visual image of energetic people dealing with the problem under a sub tropical blue sky. The home page prominently features life video streams of remotely operated vehicles. It features technical video updates from the vice president of engineering, who somewhat uncomfortably starts stating what deep impact it all has on BP, and how sorry they are but then continues enthousiastically about all the great work they have done on the “Q4000 vessel” to get oil up to the surface and “cleanly burn it”. There are visually nice pictures that others can use of large colourful booms and people working on a white beach under a deep blue sky and a tropical sun, and smooth infographics of LRMP caps and how they are deployed. Finally there are well made video ``documentaries’’ of the cleanup operations which seem to come right from some discovery channel Mega Structures episode. Finally there are ad like calls for filing claims which will all be promptly handled. In short the message is completely in line with what Hayward is saying: BP can handle it and will. Moreover BP makes it as easy as possible for other media to take that message over.

Interestingly tabs still lead to parts of the old (i.e. pre spill) website which is largely devoted to positioning BP as an green (note the logo) environmentally conscious company that is deep into Beyond Petroleum alternative energy. You can also find the 2009 report on safety  which appeared just before the explosion and which contains self gratifying quotes from mr Hayward and deep water gulf platform operators on the great progress in safety performance that has been made in 2009.

Finally the home page contains links to BP’s presence on the canonical social media: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and You Tube.  Here BP presents largely the same upbeat “we work hard under a blue sky” message as on the website except that it is more oriented toward chronologically organized buzz. Since people expect this from social media, there are possibilities to comment, and in the twitter case you can find some reactions twittered back. Interestingly, while many comments (random example from facebook page) are pro BP and pro oil industry, there are also many negative reactions, ranging from environmentalists to people living on the gulf.  Of course since BP cannot control the platform of the social media, there are also special anti BP sites for example, a boycott BP Facebook page which is actually the top google hit for BP and facebook. This clearly shows that for a company the size of BP its own website is an easier accessible medium (which in this case mostly means controllable) than a social media website.
However one cannot help noticing that BP hired people that knew what they were doing when they presented themselves on social media.

Conclusion

The PR campaigns surrounding the Deepwater Horizon spill are a battlefield on which all parties involved try to influence public opinion while at the same time having to take into account other audiences and stakes (finance, lobbyists, voters working in the energy industry, pensioners with stock, foreign relations,…). Enormous amounts of money are being spend on media, but the stakes are much higher still. It as been said that in war, truth is the first victim (attributed to Aeschylus),.One cannot help but thinking that on this media battle field a lot of at least half truth have been stated. I think a deeper analysis than the one in this blog on what was communicated when to who and by who, would be interesting for media theorists especially if it ever gets clear what actually happened.

tagged with: gulf spill, soclal media, media strategy, crossmedia

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