BP Bolsters Online Marketing Budget
BP’s digital marketing budget has grown some (ok, considerably) in recent weeks and search engine users should be wary.
The disastrous state of unnecessary affairs in the Gulf Coast has sunk BP in a bottomless PR nightmare, and the oil giant is exploring every means possible for cleaning up its sullied image.
BP CEO Tony Hayward has become an unwelcome staple of morning, noon and evening newscasts, as he waxes poetic about his company’s supposedly earnest efforts to rectify the mess it caused in the Gulf of Mexico.
When Hayward isn’t on our televisions, he’s on our computers starring in online commercials that accompany the most popular videos on YouTube (Last week, I was digitally assaulted by the man while getting my bi-weekly dose of Numa Numa).
Now, BP is seizing our search engine results pages in an attempt to disperse the black pall lingering over its name. Search for “BP” or “Oil Spill” or “Gulf Disaster” or even “BP is a Terribly Silly Company” and the top sponsored link is invariably paid for by BP, which states that it’s kindly disseminating “Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping.”
Thus, those searching for information pertinent to the spill won’t immediately see a news story. They won’t see the blog of some impassioned environmentalist or that of some corporate watchdog. They’ll find BP telling everyone how much it cares. And for almost every search imaginable - particularly those with negative connotations.
Such SERP positioning doesn’t come cheaply. Scott Slatin, an analyst for New York SEM firm Rivington, told ABC News that by his estimates BP’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) accounts on Google, Bing and Yahoo! likely cost the company in excess of $10,000 per day, to win the bidding battles for a host of vital searches related to the monumental oil spill.
While the individual cost-per-click is likely low (BP has no competition for most phrases), the sheer mass of phrases BP is bidding on makes Slatin’s estimates plausible. Even so, that kind of money is obviously negligible for a company that reported $14B in profits in 2009, and this in a down year that saw profits suffer a mind-boggling 45-percent decline from the previous year.
However, the question isn’t merely whether this is money spent wisely – even paying $100,000 per day on PPC would be money well spent given BP’s desperate need for crisis management – but whether it’s entirely ethical.
BP’s deep pockets afford it an insurmountable online advertising advantage, and as the majority of search engine users likely cannot distinguish sponsored results from organic results, it’s debatable whether search engines should be playing ball with BP, no matter how much they’re willing to pay for these clicks. Search engines are historically liberal in what phrases they accept bids on, but one wonders if that shouldn’t change in the face of tragedy.
Is it good money for the search engines? Sure. Is it sound PR strategy for BP to bulk up its digital marketing budget, to further its message that it’s genuinely acting in the best interests of the Gulf community, that it’s willing to take full responsibility for its tragically costly blunders? Certainly.
But what about search engine users – are they getting justice? When they seek out veracious information about the Gulf disaster, to learn how things are progressing (if at all), and unwittingly end up on BP’s corporate blog, are they being treated fairly?
Because the deal between search engines and search engine users has always been this: users trust the search engines to deliver the most accurate results, and search engines are rewarded when users click on the paid ads. But when those users aren’t buying anything, when they are shopping for information and not cars or tennis shoes, should they be taken advantage of? Do the rules of that deal change then?
