Former Pentagon comms pro Geoff Morrell maneuvers BP through turbulent waters marked by a reputation crisis and market freefall and, in the process, helps the brand take back its story
It’s April 20, 2010, and the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig explodes, hemorrhaging millions of barrels of oil, and much of BP’s brand reputation, into the Gulf of Mexico.
What follows is a well-publicized slate of communications missteps that exacerbates the situation, eventually resulting in the resignation of the notoriously tone deaf then-CEO Tony Hayward.
The incident becomes the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Clean up took years and litigation continues to this day, and outside the spill’s news cycle, BP, a brand previously omnipresent in newspapers and on the airwaves, goes quiet in fall 2010.
BP leadership takes stock and begins to shape what is essentially Spill 2.0, a communications strategy that evolves alongside the day-to-day triage of a disaster of the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 people. Enter Geoff Morrell, former press secretary at the Pentagon and ABC correspondent, who is hired to head up BP’s U.S. communications in September 2011. The priority becomes telling the story of what BP was doing to make things right post-spill, the billions spent on clean up, and the company’s efforts to become safer.
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