BP Calls in Heavy Artillery to Fight the PR Battle

WASHINGTON (June 4) -- Getting back its good name may be a whole lot tougher for BP than capping the oil gusher fouling the Gulf of Mexico. But no one can say the energy giant isn't enlisting enough of this city's heavy hitters to help salvage its reputation.

The company has hired Purple Strategies, a bipartisan consulting firm that offers "strategic counseling, positioning, communications and public affairs" with a "complete fusion of red and blue perspectives that companies ... need to succeed socially, politically and economically." The image shop is run by Republican Alex Castellanos, a former George W. Bush advertising adviser, and Democrat Steve McMahon, a media consultant for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Both are familiar talking heads on CNN.

Also on the case is BP's longtime communications company, Brunswick. Its Washington office is run by another CNN contributor, Hilary Rosen, former head of the Recording Industry Association of America. A former Brunswick staffer, Anne Womack Kolton, is BP's new media relations chief. In her former life, she was an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The country may be more polarized than it's been in at least a generation, but when it comes to winning over the public, there are no political parties inside the Beltway.

"That's one place where polarization doesn't play," said Gene Grabowski, a Washington crisis communications consultant. No matter who is in the White House or in power on Capitol Hill, corporations looking to repair their image rely on image meisters of all political stripes.

Same with lobbying. The top recipients of the more than $3.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, that BP has spent this year alone to lobby on energy-related issues include both Republican and Democratic firms. One of them, the Podesta Group, employs a who's who of Capitol Hill veterans from both sides of the political aisle.

It's chief, Tony Podesta, is the brother of John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and now head of the liberal Center for American Progress. In a sure sign of how Washington works, Tony's shop is working overtime for BP to handle the fallout in Congress while John's organization is doing all it can to hold the company accountable for the disaster.

But hiring the best-connected people is still no guarantee that BP can rebound from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

"They may be in a position where nothing they can do will help them," Grabowski said. "All they can do is survive this, get that oil capped and pay for the cleanup, and then look forward to years of litigation. They're really in as bad a situation as a company can get and still have a hope to survive, and only because they're in an industry where the world is hooked on oil."

And it's not clear the company is getting the best advice. For instance, BP's effort to set up a blockade to prevent media from documenting the damage was widely disparaged.

Putting CEO Tony Hayward front and center to show the company was taking full ownership of the fiasco, which led to foot-in-mouth spewings such as "the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest," may not have been the kind of transparency needed to shore up BP's reputation.

BP's new ad, in which it promises, "We will get this done. We will make this right," leaves much to be desired, Grabowski said. Noting that it comes more than six weeks after the April 20 blowout, he said: "This ad is ill-timed, coming after people are frustrated. People have no faith in what BP says. It looks to me to be wasted space."

The ad's message, that it will "honor all legitimate claims" by those harmed in the disaster, also is off, suggesting that there are illegitimate claims, Grabowski said. "All parties involved are acting more like litigants than leaders," he said, noting that President Obama -- in the gulf today for the third time since the spill -- also has not quite risen to the occasion.

In the end, BP may have to accept its place among the worst corporate PR disasters of all time. And that, Grabowski said, may convince it to do what other companies marred in scandal have done: change its name. Perhaps the folks at the company formerly, and in this case somehow appropriately, known as Blackwater might be able to help.