Ad Buster

The original BP ad that I chose is targeted towards American oil consumers. The intended audience is any American who owns a car and buys gasoline. This leaves out people who do not own cars or do not live in the US. The message is that Americans should buy BP gasoline. BP markets itself as a “green” or environmentally friendly company. Its logo invokes images of the sun, flowers, and other things associated with nature and the environment. The clean, simple aesthetic of the ad also portrays BP as “clean” and implies that buying its products will benefit the environment, which is something consumers should feel good about.

To subvert the meaning of this advertisement, I took the original ad (which is the top part) and added a picture of a shorebird covered in crude oil and the text on top of it (in yellow). The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a huge, well-publicized environmental disaster for which BP was directly responsible and received much criticism. This event brought to light the fact that BP does more harm than good to the environment, which is the opposite of the image it is trying to portray to consumers. This is highlighted in the ad with the image of the effects of the oil spill on local wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico.