BP: Getting visitors involved

Data presentation features reinforce an integrated promotional campaign.

The Site

BP, the multinational oil industry giant, is currently using its website to reinforce its repositioning as a “responsible energy business”. Among the several featured links on the home page that push visitors toward ‘green’ content is a cartoon graphic with the question ‘What size is your footprint?’ and a prompt to ‘Launch the carbon footprint calculator’.

The link leads to an interactive calculator that encourages visitors to work out their “household carbon footprint” – the amount of carbon dioxide emitted each year by their daily energy use. At the end of the calculation the user is prompted to explore related issues in the same area of the site’s Environment and society section. These cover What BP is doing, What others are doing and What you can do. The carbon footprint calculator features even more prominently on the home page of the About BP section, running banner-style across the top of the content index.

The Takeaway

BP is one of the most accomplished users of interactivity to customise and illustrate data, most notably in its environmental reporting. Here it has enlisted those skills to drive a populist feature that is designed to engage a more general audience than professional analysts and the green lobby.

A feature of the carbon footprint calculator is just how prominently it is pushed on the site, with a placement on both the home page – where competition for inclusion is always toughest – and the About BP index. Allied with clever use of a challenging consumer-magazine-style heading (‘What size is your footprint?’) it is hard to resist clicking through and plunging into the content.

Many people will be checking out the site as a result of BP’s current offline advertising campaign on the ‘beyond petroleum’ theme. That the site has been integrated into the campaign so that visitors are immediately confronted with related content reinforces straightaway the message that BP is serious about this stuff.

First published on 05 January, 2006