A Rare Exxon Mobil TV Interview … Looking for Some PR Love?

by Stuart Hampton, August 20th, 2008, 7:00 am

Exxon Mobil’s top executive gave a rare TV interview on ABC News in prime time. Was he looking for a little peace, love, and understanding?

Exxon Mobil is the 800-pound gorilla in the muscular band of Big Oil (BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and their ilk). It is the biggest company in the world in terms of market capitalization ($501 billion as of last April) and has recently capped years of record-breaking financial reports by posting a quarterly profit of $11.7 billion. But like King Kong, Exxon Mobil is arguably more feared and reviled than it is loved. Take this Barack Obama quote for instance:

Perhaps the only thing more outrageous than Exxon Mobil making record profits while Americans are paying record prices at the pump is the fact that Senator McCain has proposed giving them an additional $1.2 billion tax break.

Not much love there. (Even though Exxon Mobil’s profit margins, like those of its peers, are about 8%, slightly below average for S&P 500 companies).

But it is not just the Democrats needling a pain point — Exxon Mobil reaping eye-popping profits, in dollar terms, while consumers suffer record high gas prices — that has given the company a black eye, the company has a history of bad public relations dating back decades.

It is responsible for the Exxon Valdez disaster. Oil tanker Exxon Valdez spilled some 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Exxon Mobil spent billions on the cleanup, and in 1994 a federal jury in Alaska ordered the company to pay $5.3 billion in punitive damages to fishermen and others affected by the spill. (Exxon Mobil appealed, and in 2001 the jury award was reduced.)

Former chairman and CEO Lee Raymond was an outspoken critic of the theory  of global warming and the Kyoto Agreement. In the 1990s and the early 2000s (until his retirement in 2005) he kept Exxon Mobil focused squarely on oil and gas exploration and production (and some coal production), even while some of its peers, most notably BP (Beyond Petroleum) and Royal Dutch Shell, began to invest heavily in solar power and other renewables.

Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, gave a rare interview to ABC’s Charlie Gibson earlier this month. Was this a public relations surge, aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the American consumers with company initiatives to lower gas prices and of environmentalists with new initiatives to develop green energy? Hardly. Although Exxon Mobil is now experimenting with renewable energy, Tillerson’s comments seemed to reflect Raymond’s blunt, stick-to-our-knitting tone. When asked why only a small percentage of funds were invested in developing alternative energy sources compared to the vast amount invested in stock buybacks for company shareholders, his reply was, “We haven’t found an alternative to invest in that makes a lot of sense for us.”

His position on securing energy independence for the US?

“I’m not sure that it’s even desirable for the United States to pursue that as a goal. … Our country’s economy is so interdependent with the rest of the world in so many areas of, not just commodities, but capital markets. … So I’m not sure why we would view energy any differently than the way we view the rest of our economy.”

Hey, he is being consistent. Maybe, when you are the 800-pound gorilla, you just don’t need the love.