Quiet: there thinks BP!

by Paolo Ghiga



Imagine a modern and super efficient Office of a oil multinational, composed of the Gotha expert planning, design, problem solving and marketing, men and women able to handle extreme critical situations, from face to ordinary mortals. The adrenaline is on the agenda. Quiet, we are in good hands!

Well, now imagine a similar Office: we are in the British Petroleum HeadQuarters during a meeting of the Group Executive of BP, when at one point a cup of coffee is accidentally spilled onto the table. Panic takes over instantly people, which, in turn, announce, having given birth to the idea to resolve the situation but invariably the solution doesn’t bring any no benefit, indeed. Spend the hours and nothing changes.

Also the intervention of centrifuges to separate the crude oil produced by the company of actor Kevin Costner do not resolve the problem. Eventually the scenario is a desk devastated within the same Office, emptied, managers have disappeared.

This viral video parody that currently is depopulating networking (about 8 million hits so far) represents an alternative key to interpret the international news events. In this case the irony serves to warm funeral tones for well over what happened in the Gulf of Mexico to the platform BP Deepwater Horizon April lst: the led educational and moral question are filtered through an approach more immersive, through the ironic exasperation of the context.

The fashion of the moment, Word of mouth and video sharing, is funny and don't miss the tour of virtual community quickly unheard-of: the curiosity and less formal context push us to visit that link. That's it.

To quote Jean de Santeul: "Castigat ridendo mores" (Correct the costumes laughing at them). Today to demystify and to desecrate become important ingredients in crafting effective communicative recipes: observe the inability of these "experts" underneath an ironic lens is fun but we should not depart from the problem of an anthropocentric vision still too present in modern humankind.

While environmental communication is also in this way (welcome, if supplemented by communication and traditional information can provide feedback awareness), on the other hand is not underestimate the risk of an approach too superficial and secondment of subjects.

A parody unintended, in the light of the facts, but equally effective as real, it could be the signpost to a careful use of gasoline for there is no loss of fuel: sin that the message arrives at a BP petrol station ...