BP.com

In July, 2000 Sir John Browne launched the new BP brand, challenging the business to communicate with one brand and one voice. At Scient in London, Tom Ancona led the restructuring of the BP global web presence with the objective of giving customers the ability to gracefully move across the business, never more than two clicks away from a sales contact.

At the outset of the project, the Scient team was challenged to bring coherence to the profusion of web sites built by business divisions and subsidiaries around the world. This simple sketch was used to align the diverse stakeholders, communicating the customer-centric agenda.

The new brand identity, created by Landor, was brought to life on BP.com by the Scient team. A new online look and feel was designed, a global photo shoot was commissioned, and a collection of compelling stories—the Values Stream— authenticated the vision for the new Beyond Petroleum theme.

The Scient team created templates and digital design standards that accommodated the diverse requirements of business units around the world. Only a small percentage of pages were built by Scient, while units that ranged in size and capability used the digital standards, with flexibility in the right places, to build pages that communicated their agendas and distinctive regional character.

In the summer of 2001, as the .com era came to an abrupt halt, followed directly by the 9/11 crisis, Scient was acquired by a competing business, and Tom Ancona once again restarted A+A, in London. Over the following year A+A consulted directly with BP on conceiving a digital brand centre that would extend the new design standards across the BP global brand.