Fake BP Ad

Have you seen the following graphic that’s making the email forwarding rounds?

This is being put forth as a BP ad “from the late 90’s.” It is, of course, a fake, cooked up by those rascally rapscallions over at Despair.com (who make some pretty hilarious stuff, generally speaking). I’m pretty sure that Despair.com didn’t try to pass it off as genuine, but whoever decided to try to add some legitimacy to it didn’t do their homework.

BP’s “helios” logo wasn’t adopted until the year 2000, so trying to place the putative ad into the 90s instantly gives it away as a fake. At the same time, the company switched back to its BP name (it was BP Amoco for a couple of years prior to that) and adopted the tagline “Beyond Petroleum.”

I’ll leave to you to debate whether BP’s ad agency would have been so foolish as to suggest the slogan shown above. I’m simply not going there.