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Surely I am not the only one who has been recently barraged with Chevron's "I will" PR campaign, right?

I come home from work, open the New Yorker (above), and it's there. My friend goes to an independent café near our place in San Francisco's Mission District, and her latté is delivered in a "Human energy" coffee sleeve. I see ads on decidedly lefty websites.

The "human energy" campaign isn't new—it's been around since September last year, but the "Will you join us?" ads are only about a month old. I hardly believe that the new influx of Chevron ads is a coincidence, especially here in San Francisco, where the completely under-publicized Bowoto v. Chevron Corp. case started a few weeks ago at the Supreme Court of California. (Full disclosure: My roommate is a lawyer in the case. Guess which side.)

It's a landmark human rights case. Earth Rights International—one of the non-profit organizations representing the plaintiffs in the case—describes their case succintly:

"Chevron was complicit in gross human rights abuses committed against [Nigerian] villagers who peacefully protested environmental abuses and other harm caused by Chevron's oil production activities. The protest took place at a Chevron drilling platform. Chevron paid and ferried members of the notorious Nigerian military and 'kill and go' mobile police to the platform in Chevron-leased helicopters and Chevron personnel supervised the operation. Two protesters were shot and killed in the brutal attack – including one who was shot in the back - and others were injured."

You might wonder why I'm bringing this up seeing as how this is not the first time a corporation has tried to cover up its spotted past with a friendly publicity push. (In fact, it's definitely not the first time for Chevron.) See, for example, BP's "Beyond Petroleum" roll-out, or ExxonMobil's new "Fuels Marketing" ad (which features The Postal Service's music). I'm sure there are other clever power/energy puns I've missed.

I'm writing this post because I'm perturbed by the fact that there hasn't been a single word in the media—mainstream or otherwise—about this new campaign coinciding with the start of this trial. It's not like the trial is a secret. Yet despite this, I personally know a New York magazine reporter who was sent to write about the "cool, new" Chevron campaign this month and didn't even know about the trial! Talk about wool over the eyes.

Earlier this week, fellow Whyrooter Nathan and I discussed the socially responsible trend in corporate America. I said that if there was any corporate trend I could stand behind, it was one where for profit ventures are forced to be of true benefit to greater society. (Nathan argued that they need only be regulated more stringently, and I replied that what we were saying need not be mutually exclusive.)

This new Chevron "I will" ad campaign is part of this corporate social responsibility trend, but its timing is clearly an attempt to pre-emptively deal with a potentially heinous PR situation when the trial ends later this month. They ought to be called out on it.

-- Daniela Perdomo

 


Comments

Scott Lansing

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:25:46

Chevron's $15 million ad campaign seems like a waste of money that could have been better spent repaying and rebuilding "the destruction of the freshwater supply, erosion and pollution of the land" in Nigeria, not to mention to killing of two villagers and torture of many others (http://ccrjustice.org/files/Chevron_Basic_Facts.pdf). You can't blame Chevron for implementing a corporate responsibility initiative in light of such a travesty -- any organization would do so. But The tragic outcome of this incident is beyond fixable. Even if Chevron fiscally compensated the Nigerian villagers for the inhumane and ecologically unstable damages the oil giant caused, which after this year's report of "record quarterly profits of $7.9 billion, more than double what the oil giant earned a year earlier," I'm sure is possible. Is heinous travesty cannot go unpunished and no act of social responsibility can undo what's been done.

Chevron, with Techron...and fascist regimes.

 

Nathan Huttner

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:51:58

It's worth making a distinction between corporate social responsibility in the sense of protecting human rights, and CSR that is about digging wells, or building irrigation systems, or creating a philanthropy. I think people who work for corporations have a moral responsibility to see that their corporations do no harm to the human rights of any and all whom they affect, so a moral responsibility for CSR in the former sense. I think CSR in the latter sense is icing on the cake, and too often used to try and make up for violations of people's rights. That doesn't work, and it's this kind of, "Ignore us displacing villagers while we donate millions to cure AIDS" that bothers me. I will probably blog about this soon. :)

 



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