ConocoPhillips College Students Ad

This spot shows a trio of college students arguing about energy production in what looks like a chemistry or physics class auditorium, after the class has finished. This commercial is especially funny in its showing of three college students having different points of view about oil companies. In my experience, all college students hate oil companies as evil capitalist Earth murderers, and nothing will ever convince them otherwise. Oh, but this ad has only one liberal college student, and she’s willing to listen to someone about the merits of drilling for energy (!).

This ad is pure fantasy. Everyone knows all college kids hate corporations and want 100% clean energy, and will hate and shout down anyone who tries to convince them otherwise. How do I know this? I used to be a college student. You can’t get a liberal college student who hates corporations to listen to anyone who disagrees with their point of view: they just put words in their mouth, like: “Well, you just want to rape the Earth, you money-grubbing bastard!” (etc.) They’re not able to be convinced, and even if they could be, they shout everyone else down so as not to hear anything that would or could convince them.

I know this because I went to a very liberal college, and this was always my experience. Plus, I was like that myself, to a certain extent. So to see this travesty play out in an oil company ad, as if college students are arguing about how we should all give oil companies the benefit of the doubt and support them, rather than getting stoned and ordering a pizza while bitching about “the man”, is patently ridiculous!

I’m not bashing college kids, mind you; just the fact that they’d be misrepresented in an oil company commercial like this. College kids aren’t supposed to have to live in the real world yet, so they can still have ideals. Oil companies don’t have any ideals, just lobbyists. So tell us all about your plan, and make fun of college kids all you want, but please don’t pretend that you can convince them that they can trust you to drill and mine and burn all the stuff you want without environmental impact or consequence. You lose all of your credibility when you do that. (And I thought I could trust oil companies! Would that I had not mine eyes opened to such ugliness of untruthfulness!)

You see, we might be desperate enough to believe the oil company, since we want and need cheap energy; but they (the college students) never will until they have to pay for the energy themselves. And that’s just a fact.

I can’t find this ad online, and I’m guessing it’s because the internet is a youth-oriented playground, where this spot would be ruthlessly torn apart and made fun of if it were there. Have you ever seen the comments section of a YouTube video? Well, my guess is that the one associated with this commercial would be about as snide and hostile as possible, and not without good reason.

No, no: wait! Here it is (unbelievably)! I found it today, April 12, 2012. And look, it's just as I suspected: way more dislikes than likes (53 nays vs. 11 yays), and the comments have been disabled! (I wonder why?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urTYPe9j0WM

I think if an oil company wants to make inroads with college kids, they ought to accurately depict how college kids distrust and detest them, and then show how most all of the things students love to do (from driving cars, to playing music, to watching movies, to recharging or even having their iPods, cell phones and laptops) would be impossible or practically unattainable without the oil companies providing affordable energy, not to mention plastics, which are petroleum-based. But while they’re making record profits of late, the oil companies have done next to nothing to control the prices at the pump, jacking up the price at every opportunity, so the argument for cheap energy starts to fall apart, or at least gets cloudy, like the clouds of smog that pollute our cities. But if it was my assignment to make an ad for them, that’s what it would be: showing young people how much everything they like to do depends on the energy and byproducts from oil. Even the idealism of college kids might begin to fade if they couldn't afford to use all their gadgets, not to mention perhaps not even having them at all to begin with. But maybe that's hitting below the belt.