Gasoline & Dry Tinder

There’s been a lot of talk about the big winners during this economic meltdown.

Bank of America.

General Motors (maybe).

NASCAR

Wooden Arrow Makers.

Even Barack Obama was supposedly helped by the meltdown as John McCain clarified to the nation’s voters why he’s never been invited to serve on the Finance Committee.

But, from a branding perspective, there is a big, BIG winner who we haven’t heard from in a while.

Remember when gas prices were hovering around four bucks a gallon?
Remember all of those TV commercials by oil companies that were playing?

For those who pay attention to this type of thing (both of us) here’s the score:

- BP had spots on the air entitled “Energy Security 1” and “Energy Diversity”

- Exxon had a whole series of commercials on how their new technology was helping them find new oil deposits, get to them with minimal damage to the environment and how their innovations were making batteries last longer.

- Even Citgo re-released it’s Hugo Chavez propaganda/lobbying campaign.

Why all these ads?

You might jump to the conclusion that big oil started to advertise when prices went up because people weren’t buying as much gas.

Before you go there, however, try these statistics on:

According to the Energy Information Administration, even when prices where at their highest (July), Americans still bought more than 55,000,000 gallons of gas EVERY DAY.

In fact, the big, 2,000,000 gallon a day dip in gas consumption didn’t actually take place till well into September – AFTER gas prices started coming back down to earth.

So if the ad spree wasn’t about boosting sales, what was it about?

That’s right. Branding.

In the midst of a heated election and to drown out the shrill cries of “Drill Baby Drill”, big oil, across the board, needed to find a way to lessen the impact of being painted as “THE BAD GUY.” Right down the line, each of them launched their own branding campaign in an attempt to show how they were in this thing with us. The goal, of course, was to keep the US government out of their knickers while also keeping the US citizenry from picking up pitchforks and torches in order to storm the big oil bastilles.

Did the marketing efforts work?

Well… not exactly. They didn’t have to.

The omnipresent marketing efforts of big oil companies were shouted out of necessity, not by the din of the right screaming for more drilling or the shrill of the left whining about exorbitant profits but, rather, by the deafening shatter that followed our economic meltdown. Four dollars a gallon still sucked – but not nearly as badly as the loss of savings, homes and jobs.
Today, gasoline consumption remains pretty much exactly where it was throughout the last couple years, right around 55 million gallons per day.

Prices have come down and that’s good. But that’s not why you don’t see big oil companies advertising in every break of your local news or national sporting event. It’s because they are no longer in the cross hairs of the public’s ire and concern or the government's new corporate acquisition program. Therefore, big oil no longer needs to prosecute what could have been one of the most costly and most protracted, industry-wide marketing campaign since big Tobacco tried to advertise themselves out of crisis not so long ago. And that means all of that money they would have spent on branding can go right back to the bottom line.

Just one more thing for which the oil industry has to thank Wall Street.