KANSAS CITY -- Advertising and public relations shop Barkley (the PR firm formerly known as Barkley Evergreen & Partners Inc.) launched a new campaign for its client, CITGO Petroleum.
The Kansas City-based firm started new print and broadcast spots that seek to portray CITGO as a strong and charitable company, Mike Swenson, president of Barkley's PR arm, told The Kansas City Business Journal.
The new campaign follows full-page public statement ads that ran in several large daily newspapers last week. Houston-based CITGO, which [image-nocss] is wholly owned by Venezuela's government-run oil company, received negative publicity recently following Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's remarks during a speech at the United Nations.
Chavez referred to President Bush as the devil, and some conservative commentators subsequently urged their listeners and readers to boycott CITGO gas stations. A week after the speech, convenience store chain 7-Eleven announced it was dropping CITGO as its gasoline supplier. Both 7-Eleven and CITGO insisted the decision wasn't related to Chavez's remarks.
Barkley, which has had CITGO as a client for seven years, is launching a 30-second TV ad and a related print spot that highlight the company's charitable outreach and emphasize its American roots. But Swenson claimed that the new campaign's timing was not in response to the Chavez flap. It has nothing to do with that, Swenson told the newspaper. It has everything to do with what's typical of all large American corporations: They're always trying to remind their customers of the kind of company they are and how many people they employ. Tune into any of the Sunday talk shows and you'll see large companies trying to remind us all how great they are. And that's what this one is trying to do, too.
Swenson claimed that the timing of the campaign, which debuts this week, was only a coincidence. We've been working on it for a long time, he said. Ad campaigns don't happen overnight. It's been in the works for quite awhile.
Swenson declined to reveal to the Business Journal the cost of the campaign. He said it is scheduled to run through the fall.
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