New Orleans runs $5m anti-British campaign – paid for by BP | Travel | The Guardian

New Orleans runs $5m anti-British campaign – paid for by BP | Travel | The Guardian




New Orleans in fog Photograph: Bullaty-Lomeo /Getty

The B in BP may no longer mean British, but tell that to New Orleans. The city is using a $5m cheque from the company to launch what might be seen as only a slightly tongue-in-cheek anti-British campaign, aimed at luring tourists who might be discouraged by the approaching oil spill.

New Orleans is using BP's money to launch a series of television and newspaper advertisements across the US on Friday, including one that declares: "This isn't the first time New Orleans has survived the British."

The slogan is set against a statue of General Andrew Jackson, who repelled a British assault on New Orleans back in 1814.

But it says in the small print that "right now everyone is welcome, especially our friends from England". (In the US, the terms British and English are often regarded as interchangeable even when it comes to the World Cup.)

The advertising campaign is the brainchild of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, which fears a sharp reduction in tourism and gatherings of other kinds, just as business was picking up after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

"You can't just say we're open, come," the bureau's president, Steve Perry, told the organisation as he launched the campaign, according to blogofneworleans.com. "You have to acknowledge it. It's sorta like the poster with the family in front of the shark tank at the aquarium after Katrina, saying we're pleased to report that this is the only part of New Orleans that's still under water."

New Orleans considered some other slogans including: "In times of stress, we eat." But then it was thought that stress and vacation did not really go very well together.

Perry said that the campaign was also about trying to persuade people that the Gulf of Mexico was a big place geographically and that the oil was nowhere near New Orleans, even if the city did sit beside the affected Gulf of Mexico. "All of the things that visitors come to enjoy in New Orleans remain unchanged by the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf," he said.

BP wrote a $15m (£10.1m) cheque to promote tourism in Louisiana last month. It paid a similar amount to the state of Alabama, and $25m to Florida.

The city plans to start the campaign on television stations in large cities such as Chicago and Houston and in national newspapers.

Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in late April, BP has faced a barrage of criticism from the US president, Barack Obama, as well from environmental groups and from commentators across social networking sites.

But the anti-British sentiment is not limited to the non-British. Or perhaps that should be anti-English sentiment.

Dame Helen Mirren told the American chat show host David Letterman that BP stood for "bloody piss-poor" and that she was glad England did not beat the US in their World Cup match.

Mirren was cut off by vigorous applause from the studio audience after putting the boot into BP, then continued: "I mean I don't think I could have come on this show.

"I would have been so embarrassed and mortified at being British that I think I would have had to cancel."