Billiton name buried in BHP makeover

Billiton will embark on its second major branding campaign, reverting to its basic name BHP.

BHP’s new campaign.

More than three decades after BHP hired actor Bill Hunter to tell television audiences about “the Big Australian”, and 16 years after it bought Billiton, the world’s biggest miner will embark on its second major branding campaign, reverting to its basic name BHP and emphasising its Broken Hill roots.

BHP Billiton, or BHP as it would like to be now known, will launch a $10 million television and print advertising campaign in Australia today featuring the miner’s own people and the slogan “think big”.

It is partly an attempt to tackle a growing loss of public trust in corporations and, more specifically for BHP, the public relations damage that followed a dam burst at one of its Brazilian mines that killed 19 people.

BHP has shed nearly all of the assets it ­acquired in a 2001 takeover of South Africa’s Billiton. That merger led to BHP’s dual listing in London and has been criticised by some Australian commentators as having substantially reduced the value of the now 132-year-old Melbourne-based mining firm from what it could otherwise have been.

The new television campaign was developed by the ­advertising legend Ted Horton’s Big Red agency, which was enlisted by John Howard to help the Liberals with several election campaigns.

BHP’s external affairs boss, Geoff Healy, said the campaign had its genesis 18 months ago, as it became clear that trust in big companies had been lost, something a subsequent survey of suppliers, investors and the community confirmed.

“We try hard to be a good company and we think we contribute significantly to communities and to the Australian economy, so we got a little bit of a shock when we realised that, while a lot of people knew the name, not many people knew what we did or stood for, or our commitment to the broader country,” Mr Healy said.

“Trust has been lost in companies like ours and if we’re going to reverse that we have to get out and change the way the community looks at us. Part of that is getting out and telling the story directly.”

When BHP launched its ­famous Big Australian campaign in 1986, two years after Robert Holmes a Court had made an ­unsuccessful takeover raid, its aim was to let the ­nation know that, despite a move into Chilean copper and US oil, it remained “Australia’s BHP”. The Hunter ads outlined the opening of the gas fields of the North-West Shelf gas fields and the expansion of the Port Kembla steelworks in NSW.

The drivers for this second campaign are a little different. Eighteen months ago, when the campaign planning began, BHP was in crisis mode.

A November 5, 2015 tailings dam collapse at the half-owned Samarco operations in Brazil had sent a tsunami of mine waste sludge into a nearby village, killing 19 people and polluting the Doce river system. Fines and the issue of criminal charges for the dam collapse have still not been finalised.

Nearly three months after the disaster, chief executive Andrew Mackenzie made a pilgrimage to the city where the Broken Hill Proprietary company was formed, even though BHP had not mined there in almost 80 years. On that trip, which had a profound impact on the mining boss, Mr Mackenzie privately told town elders they would be hearing a lot less of the Billiton name in the future, and that the company’s Broken Hill heritage was in for greater recognition.

The launch comes less than two weeks after Scott Morrison weighed-in on the miner’s importance to Australia, providing support in the face of a campaign by New York hedge fund Elliott Management for structural change. The Treasurer said he would block any such move and that directors could face criminal charges if they tried it.

Two 30-second television ads and a three-minute internet video were filmed in January. BHP Billiton will remain the official name for now, but will eventually be changed to BHP.