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With the For all our tomorrows campaign, British
Petroleum has presented its concern with the
future.
Two of the advertisements show it introducing
solar power to remote areas of the world, enabling
a schoolboy in rural Africa to study in the evening
and providing villagers in Thailand, Zambia and
Indonesia with a water supply.
Another
discusses BP support for educational programmes and
its links with schools near its plants. A fourth
concerns an oil which enables weedkillers to be
sprayed more accurately, avoiding damage to insects
and wildlife. This featured a ladybird with the
caption “Weedkillers needn’t be ladykillers”. A
survey showed it to be the best – remembered
advertisement ever in the Wall Street Journal.
The campaign ran on TV in Britain, on
satellite/cable services internationally and in
international business publications. It followed a
BP Britain at its Best campaign and marked the
company’s transition to a more international
outlook, with the British government selling its
shareholding.
International research showed that people
regarded the oil industry as greedy but necessary
and that no one was offering reassurance for the
future. Ivor Coudge, manager of corporate
advertising, comments: “The opportunity was
therefore for BP to be seen as the oil company who
were solving tomorrow’s problems today.”
“The advertising projected BP as far-sighted,
international, committed to quality, and
leaders/innovators/achievers but in a sensitive and
enlightened fashion. The individual advertisements
concentrate on specific ways that we endeavour to
be a responsible corporate citizen wherever we
operate. This has increased awareness of BP’s
commitment and contribution to world
development.”
BP is the world’s third largest oil company,
operates in 70 countries from Colombia to Vietnam
and employs 118,000 people. Apart from oil
exploration, refining and selling, it makes
chemicals and animal feed. It supplies over half
the world market for fish feed and it farms shrimps
in East Asia.
Its solar-power subsidiary, BP Solar, has
offices in India, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, South Africa
and Thailand as well as Europe and Australia, and
has a factory in Thailand. Solar power, needing no
fuel or spare parts, can bring to scattered rural
communities a reliable electricity supply for water
and light and for refrigerating vaccines. Projects
have been financed by the World Bank, the World
Health Organisation and other agencies.
BP began in 1901 when William Knox D’Arcy, a
gold prospector, decided there might be oil in
Persia. Seven years later, his surveyors struck oil
there, the first commercial discovery in the Middle
East.
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