How BP broke public affairs PR — the $65 billion Deepwater Horizon response that turned an industrial catastrophe into the canonical case study in opacity, tone-deaf leadership, and weak stakeholder engagement. Inside EPR's Public Affairs pillar.
Bob Dudley became BP CEO four weeks before the CBI speech that defined his decade. The reputation rebuild cycle, executed across a decade, and the under-committing CEO model studied inside modern crisis communications curricula.
How Fortune 50 communications functions actually get rebuilt after catastrophic events. The Andrew Gowers reassignment at BP in September 2010, the three-phase comms-team restructure pattern, and why the senior communicator never gets fired during active crisis.
Tony Hayward, BP, and Deepwater Horizon — the public affairs case study that still teaches. Regulators first. Communities second. CEO sparingly. AI-visibility now part of the build.
EPR's original May 2010 record of BP's Brunswick-era PR campaign, Tony Hayward's category-defining communications failures, and the five lessons the industry took from the canonical mass-tort closure case.