It might seem a little ironic that BP, or British Petroleum, has committed millions to sponsoring the US Olympic team, but its actually not that surprising in a world where most corporations have operations that span the globe. It’s also clearly part of long-term PR moves by the oil giant, started during the 2012 Olympics, to distance themselves from Deepwater Horizon spill. The commercials featuring Team BP, moreover, are a good entry point into seeing just how many corporate pies the multi-national oil company has its fingers in.

If you watch the “BP’s Team USA” commercial, it seems rather innocuous as Olympic commercials go: Athletes prepping for success that is somehow powered by fossil fuels (“American energy, wherever it comes from”). As members of Team BP are Top athletes in their fields, it is not surprising that they appear in several other commercials as well. Interestingly, however, though these other spots never once mention BP, many are from companies in which BP owns stock. Alpine Skier Heath Calhoun is in a touching AT&T ad; BP owns 715,000 shares of AT&T.[1] The shots of hockey player Julie Chu and cross-country skier Kikkan Randall in the Team BP ad actually appear to be lifted from their individual commercials for Bounty paper towels and Kashi cereal respectively. BP owns 425,000 shares of Procter and Gamble, the parent company of the Bounty brand. In fact, Procter and Gamble owns many of the brands featuring Olympic athletes in their commercials including CoverGirl who sponsors BP Team member Ashley Wagner and non-BP team members Gracie Gold (who is also sponsored by Visa in which BP has holdings), and NyQuil who sponsors Ted Ligety. Interestingly BP does not have holdings in Kellogg’s, the parent company of Kashi and competitor to Kraft (of which BP owns 204,000 shares) and General Mills (of which BP owns 46,000 shares). Kellogg however has long been an Olympic sponsor. Moreover, since members of Team Kellogg overlap with Team BP (Heath Calhoun and Kikkan Randall) and many of the companies for which Team Kellogg athletes appear in commercials are among those BP has holdings in, the cross-promotion is less surprising than a first glance would suggest.

Looking more broadly, BP owns shares of half (five out of ten) of the Worldwide Olympic Sponsors:

Coca-Cola: 317,000 shares

GE: 1,570,000 shares

McDonalds: 161,000 shares

P&G: 425,000 shares

Visa: 71,000 shares

They also hold 67,000 shares in Nike and 25,000 in Ralph Lauren, official outfitters of the US Olympic team and 470,000 shares in Comcast (parent company of NBC the official Olympic broadcasting partners).

There are many different reasons people are concerned over the commercialization of the Olympic games.  There is, for example, the argument that is ruins the spirit of the games, something people as different as author Mary Perryman and the Pope assert. In response to those allegations, long-time IOC member Richard Pound argues that sponsors are the reason there is such a thing as the Olympic games in the first place. It’s always worth considering the hypocrisy of rules that don’t allow athletes to talk about or display those corporate sponsorships at the games, however (although social media is allowing some a way around that). The biggest story in tracing the corporate investment trail hinted at by BP’s commercial, however, is that it’s not enough to talk about individual companies trading in on the media spectacle that is the Olympics. In contemporary capitalism many of the corporate sponsors are making money off of other companies making money off of the Olympics. That’s pretty meta. Transnational capital is the big winner of the Olympics regardless of which athletes end up on the medal podium.

One example of this “ad-as-content” strategy is Ford’s “Escape My Life” web series.  Debuting in September 2012, “Escape My Life” is an 8-episode series (available on YouTube, Hulu, and other online venues) featuring comedians Natasha Leggero and Jo Lo Truglio.  In the series, Leggero plays Skylar, a Hollywood costume designer who desperately needs a new car.  On the advice of a friend, she decides to take part in a marketing program (ostensibly sanctioned by Ford) in which Hollywood types can get a new Ford Escape for free.  (The friend calls it “Product placement in real life.”)  In the suspicious-looking office of the program head, she signs a sheaf of papers without reading them, and happily drives her new Escape home – only to be confronted with socially maladjusted Barry (Truglio) upon arrival.  You see, it appears that by signing that stack of papers she didn’t read, she agreed to let Barry go with her everywhere to show her how to use the Escape’s features, and to (eventually) document and blog about his experiences with Skylar and the SUV.  Hijinks ensue as the two try to live with one another throughout the series.

What’s interesting about “Escape My Life” is that the series ultimately spends only a small portion of its time on the Escape itself.  Each episode features one or two brief mentions of the SUV’s features – from the Sync system to the roomy interior to the hands-free foot-activated gate lift – and each concludes with a 15-second ad highlighting those features.  Aside from that, however, the SUV operates as a backdrop for the action more than the star of the series.  According to Ford, this was, in fact, the primary motivation behind the series.  In a press release, Ford’s Digital Marketing manager Brock Winger claims, “We are not talking at them, we are showing them the Escape and how it is used in daily life.”

But I argue that it’s more complicated than that.  There is absolutely no denying that the series functions as an advertisement for the Escape, and I certainly don’t think that any audience member would be fooled into thinking otherwise.  But perhaps that’s simply part of its charm.  As Fast Company’s Joe Berkowitz notes, the series is particularly notable for the fact that it functions as a meta-commentary on marketing itself, as the drama centers around Ford’s deployment of a new “real-life product placement” marketing campaign.  In his analysis, Berkowitz contends, “In acknowledging how annoying it is when you’re forced to watch an ad that’s trying not to be an ad, the ad-based show becomes instantly more accessible.”

Compared to a traditional ad campaign, the series might not seem a major success – the first episode has been viewed around 240,000 times on YouTube, with the rest averaging 30,000-40,000 views.  Even a weak cable channel has far more viewers.  But the difference, of course, is that those who came to watch “Escape My Life” online sought it out, were thus more likely to watch it closely, and probably left with a higher degree of brand message recall than the average viewer of a 30-second spot.  (Certainly I now know much more about the features of the Ford Escape than I did before watching the series, and I rather enjoyed myself while consuming the ads, too!)  As Ford’s Winger notes, “The series reaches out to consumers where they are at in their media consumption behaviors – we are not interrupting them and forcing them to go somewhere else or stop what they are doing in order to watch and enjoy the content.”  And this, I contend, is key to the “ad-as-content” strategy: as audiences migrate away from live TV viewing and advertisers become increasingly concerned about how to get their messages out, series like “Escape My Life,” which invite viewers to engage more directly and deeply with a brand (while being entertained!), might just be the wave of the future.