A couple of new ads for ExxonMobil seem to have a much better advertising strategy lately. The ads are quite good, accurately showing what exactly it is that petroleum does for us, and why we need it, rather than apologizing for the negative things everyone always criticizes. I think these ads will do a lot more to help ExxonMobil show how they provide plenty of good things we all need.
But there’s something really familiar about these ads and the strategy they use, and I’m not sure why.
Oh, wait: I remember now! These ads follow almost exactly the strategy I laid out for oil company ads over two years ago on this very blog. I’m sure they didn’t just read it, like it, and use it without crediting or compensating me or anything, because that wouldn’t be very nice of them; but it is rather odd how these ads so faithfully follow my strategy, even seeming to put the points in the same order as I laid it out in one ad, and with the word I put in bold: ‘plastics’, getting its own separate ad as well (this time being more specifically “medical plastics” in their ad). That is rather a strange coincidence, don’t you think? Oh well, I’m sure that’s all it is, even if I did come up with this strategy two years before they did.
Well, obviously I’m not the only one who could have thought this strategy up (unlike some of my ad ideas, which can be a bit zany, anyone using reasoning could have thought of this), but nobody was making ads like this when I wrote it (ExxonMobil was doing the “Let’s Solve This” ads where they pointed out problems but offered no solutions, BP was bragging about how they saved the Gulf by spilling oil all over it and then cleaning it up, Chevron was making the “We Agree” ads showing split-screens of normal people raising energy issues and Chevron scientists supposedly providing solutions, and in a fantasy scenario, ConocoPhillips was showing college students being open-minded about oil companies, rather than hating them) and most of the oil company ads of the time seemed less than helpful to me, so I wrote up and posted the advertising strategy to demonstrate what I thought would work better. And you know what, I think it does work a lot better now that I see it on TV. But it looks a lot like they read my blog to me. (If I were them, I would have web crawlers to see what people were saying about my company; but if someone had a good strategy to help, I would hire them, because it’s likely they’d have lots more good ideas to offer.)
But if they did use my strategy without asking (and they would know if they did), I want a sky writer apology, like Shia LaBoeuf made to Daniel Clowes. (Just kidding. Actually, credit for the idea and compensation would be nice. And it’s always nice to ask first.)
Here’s the ExxonMobil ad I’m referring to (See if it seems familiar after you read the paragraph below):
And here’s what I wrote on October 21, 2011:
I think if an oil company wants to make inroads with college kids, they ought to … 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.
It was at the end of this post:
And here is another post that references my original strategy from May, 2013:
And here’s the ExxonMobil plastics ad:
Well, just to see what happens, I think I’ll write up an oil company ad of my own (in a separate post) and see if it appears on television later. If it does, I think we’ll all see what’s going on here.
