This Tuesday at noon, a group of volunteers toting vuvuzelas gathered outside of BP’s International Headquarters in London and sounded their barbaric yelps in protest of the way the company is handling the oil spill in the Gulf.
We’ve been covering this campaign since the very beginning — ever since Adam Quirk, a web video producer from Brooklyn and the co-founder of Wreck & Salvage art video collective, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy vuvuzelas and enlist Craigslist volunteers to his cause.
At first Quirk was only aiming to raise $2,000 — a goal he surpassed in less than two days. After gaining some media attention, he received aid from some heavy-hitters in the social media world, including Ben Huh of The Cheezburger Network, who pledged $1,000. Babelgum furnished an additional $2,000, sent camera crews to London to cover the event and interview organizers and the people behind the Gulf Disaster Fund, which this whole event was funding. Quirk was, by that point, aiming to raise $10,000, but didn’t end up reaching that goal. Still, he’s gathered together more than $6,000 for the cause, and that ain’t chump change.
“We’ve kind of already won,” Quirk said in an interview with Babelgum (embedded below). “At this point it’s basically about keeping BP in the public eye, keeping some negative attention on them… Unless there’s public pressure on them, they’re going to be allowed to slip through the cracks.”
Quirk is just one member of the online community aiming to keep BP on its toes — there’s satirical Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, JESS3 and its clever plugin, Tumblr and its paint-it-black dashboard, and more. We’ll have to wait and see if any of this digital derision has any impact. In the meantime, check out Babelgum’s collection of vids from its dedicated “Vuvuzelas for BP” page below:
BP Vuvuzela Protest
Adam Quirk Speaks
The Gulf Disaster Fund
More About: gulf oil spill, humor, MARKETING, money, pop culture, vuvuzela, web video
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