Beyond We Told You So
John Kenney, a former advertising guy, wrote an op-ed entitled "Beyond Propaganda" last week in the The New York Times about his disillusionment upon finally accepting that the new company name and identity for BP he helped create - "Beyond Petroleum" to replace "British Petroleum"- has turned out to be just so much bunkum designed to make a dirty oil company look environmentally friendly on TV, while it's busy drilling for ever more petroleum and spilling billions of gallons all over Alaska.
Its nice to know there are (or were) still idealists in the ad business, people who believe their job can be something noble instead of public deceipt and manipulation. And kind of sad he was so naive.
We at CorpWatch, however, have always been cynical enough to see through obvious rebranding. Way back in 200, we wrote this about BP's new image: "British Petroleum: Beyond Pompous, Beyond Protest,
Beyond Pretension, Beyond Preposterous, Beyond Platitudes, Beyond
Posturing, Beyond Presumptuous, Beyond Propaganda... Beyond Belief."
- 180 Media & Entertainment
- 183 Environment
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