The BP Oil spill live feed offers the Anova Group a chance to demonstrate a few lessons in agile digital marketing. As of the time of writing this blog, millions of people have been searching on Google, Yahoo and Bing the following 5 words – “BP Oil Spill Live Feed”. I myself actually performed that search 4-5 times over the past few days in hopes that the ‘top kill’ procedure would have worked.
Unfortunately, as of 6 P.M. EST on May 29th, it appears the top kill has not worked and that BP is moving towards trying to shoot golf balls down the well so as to block the oil. Stepping away from my environmental concerns regarding the catastrophe, my thoughts move towards how this exemplifies the type of events that digital marketers should be responding to more frequently. At first thought, some people may think but who in the right mind would want to be associated in any ways with this disaster. Off the top of my head, I came up with at least 3 organizations that would benefit from actively marketing to those who search for “BP Oil Spill Live Feed”.
The first would be Greenpeace or any environmental non-profit organization. Regardless of who is to blame, the oil spill illustrates how human error can lead to tragic consequences regarding the environment. For these organizations, they have the opportunity to connect with a much larger base of citizens concerned about the environmental impact of the gulf oil spill
The second would be manufacturers of hybrid or electronic cars. They could emphasize the angle of by owning an electronic car, the oil companies won’t be drilling for oil for you. There could even be a guilt marketing play that says that anyone who drives a non-electric car is at least partially to blame for the oil spill.
The third organization that would benefit from actively marketing to those searching on the BP oil spill would actually be BP itself. To their credit, I have actually seen some ads offering information to citizens on how they are trying to address both stopping the well and protecting the environment from the oil that has already escaped. Although BP is suffering a public relations nightmare, someone on the search engine marketing side was at least paying attention.
To show that Anova Group puts our money where our mouth is, we ourselves have launched our own agile marketing campaign. This includes the blog that you are currently reading as well as a search marketing campaign shown in the screen shot below. You will notice that only BP and Anova Group have taken advantage of paid search marketing here. We will let you know how it turns out!
June 21st Update
Two weeks after we wrote this blog, NPR had an article on BP bidding on search results which caused a furor on how BP was spending money.
