December 15, 2010 10:01 AM UTC

Drill Your Cake. And Eat It, Too.

• 6 Comments
• by: ardy39

(…and this kids is what happens with a blowout…   – promoted by ClubTwitty)

.

Or … when astro-turfing leaves a bad taste in your mouth, try putting (green) icing on it.

EnCana Corporation is a corporate “person” with North American headquarters in Alberta, Canada. They are big. A new headquarters (“The Bow”) is under construction in Calgary. There are conflicting accounts, but when complete, “The Bow” will be among the tallest buildings in Canada (and may be the tallest).

Anyway, I digress … there’s a video I’d like you to watch …

The reason you should care about what this corporation does to promote itself is that EnCana Corp, and a subsidiary, EnCana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc, is among the largest producers of natural gas in North America and in Colorado. In addition to maintaining over 5,000 wells in Garfield, Rio Blanco, and Mesa Counties (their principle area of operation in Colorado), EnCana has nearly 1,400 wells in Weld County and approximately 220 wells in Boulder, Broomfield, and Adams Counties. (as per the COGCC/COGIS database)

EnCana wants you to feel safe about hydraulic fracturing (aka, “frac’ing” or “fracking,” a method that requires forcing a chemical stew under high pressure into geologic formations with tightly held methane in order to fracture the rock and allow the gaseous commodity to be released and recovered). To this end, EnCana provides a short document to explain hydraulic fracturing that is sufficiently factual (even though the language has been chosen to manipulate the reader – pdf available here). EnCana also provids a good video explanation here, but wait to view that until after you’ve viewed the video below.

Anyway, when I read or view something like the above resources, I can understand that a corporation is trying to influence my opinion of them, but that they consider me an intelligent adult and provide sufficient detail and complexity that I feel I have learned something useful to me.

So far, so good.

EnCana, apparently dissatisfied with these “facty” explanations of hydraulic fracturing, has now produced something completely different. Something wholly insulting.

For the life of me, I can not figure out why any business would produce and promote something like this:

OK, the obvious. These kids are bored. Their questions (ignore the subtitles) are all along the lines of “can we eat those cupcakes now?” Look at where their eyes are focused.

But seriously, what the hell is going on here? This lecture is completely over the heads of these kids. Is EnCana conducting focus group testing of a new approach? Are they testing to see whether they have dumbed down the information sufficiently so that a typical “keep government hands off my Medicaid funded electric cart” tea partier can understand?

Can those of you with marketing experience help me to understand why this video exists?

Frankly I think EnCana has completely failed. I am insulted. More seriously, I find myself questioning the competence of those managing this corporation. EnCana promotes this video and still wants me to feel that they are not going to harm my drinking water? That they won’t poison the air I breathe? That they will reclaim the landscapes they’ve disturbed? This video leaves me thinking that they consider me and my concerns to be little more than a joke.

I’ll leave you with three questions that still nag me:

Why the pig?

Sprinkles? Really?

Can we eat the cupcakes now?

(h/t DeSmog Blog)