Climate Monitor: October 14th
Climate group spending on Facebook ads continued decline as their spending on Google held mostly steady
Welcome to Climate Monitor, your weekly digest of the digital tactics and strategies that polluters and climate-action groups are deploying online to shift public opinion and move legislation. We’ve examined political ad spending on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Google by several dozen groups and corporations from the past week, as well as their activities on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
Here’s what we found:
Weekly Build Back Better Climate Update:
Overall, here’s a breakdown of how much advertisers in the pro-BBB outside group coalition spent on Facebook last week. Once again last week, spending decreased from the previous week, as we discuss in our digital ads roundup below.
Stand for Children was the number one spender on Facebook ads last week, spending more than twice as much on the platform than the DSCC, NRSC, DCCC, and NRCC *combined*. As far as we can tell, all of it is going toward ads that promote extending the Child Tax Credit in the Build Back Better Act, funded by closing tax loopholes for the wealthy. However, we did find that LIUNA, which had been investing in ads pushing for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, didn’t run any Facebook ads last week.
And, here’s a breakdown of how much advertisers in the pro-BBB outside group coalition spent on Google + YouTube ads last week. After running a sizable YouTube campaign against freshman Republicans in the House of Representatives, Climate Power didn’t run any ads on the platform last week. However, the League of Conservation Voters is still spending relatively huge sums on the platform, including on a new campaign pushing for electrifying our school buses - more on that below.
For a full picture of pro and anti BBB spending not necessarily related to climate, view our public tracker here >>.
More Digital Advertising Data 📈
Facebook + Instagram
Last week, we saw spending on Facebook ads related to climate, the environment, and energy continue to decline sharply by relevant groups. Several groups that had been spending more than $100k on the platform every week, such as the Green New Deal Network, the American Chemistry Council, and even ExxonMobil have all but stopped running Facebook ads. However, climate groups are still greatly outspending polluters on the platform.
Here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
The Alliance for Climate Education - one of last week’s top spenders on climate ads due to other groups pulling down their campaigns - now appears to be running voter registration and mobilization ads targeting young adults in Ohio. They seem to be particularly focused on Portsmouth, where a ballot initiative could give residents more freedom to purchase their energy from clean energy sources.
Third Way was one of the other few groups that still ran ads focused on advocacy. They ran a series of ads thanking Reps. Chris Pappas, Elissa Slotkin, Susie Lee, Sharice Davids, Lizzie Fletcher, Colin Allred, Abigail Spanberger, and Marc Veasey for “fighting for tax cuts that will create more clean energy jobs” in their state and “creating new jobs, securing infrastructure investments, and tackling climate change head on.” These ads ran for just a week, and were mostly targeted at young adult women in the members’ respective states.
Most other climate groups that are still running Facebook ads now seem to be spending their budgets on fundraising and email acquisition campaigns as opposed to persuasion or mobilization campaigns. Among these are Greenpeace USA and NRDC, which are both now running fundraising and acquisition ads using the recent oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach, CA.
On the flipside, we noticed that a couple new groups have started running Facebook ads seemingly arguing against federal energy regulation. Among them is Voices for Cooperative Power, an advocacy group under the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, started running ads this month that are reminiscent of ads deployed by polluters and other right-wing groups, using rhetoric like, “Washington D.C. policymakers don't live here. Why do they control our energy future?” These ads seem to be targeted at older Americans in states including Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio.
We also found that a group called the American Highway Users Alliance has been running a relatively small national Facebook ad campaign that echoes rhetoric from API. Two of their ads read, “Our roads depend on American energy independence.” These ads were also targeted overwhelmingly at older Americans, but because the spend is so small - just over $11k - and the geographic target so wide, the overall reach of their campaign appears to be quite low.
Click here for more data on the latest ads.
Google + YouTube
LCV spent $205,400 on YouTube ads last week, partially on a new campaign focused on electrifying the nation’s school buses. These 30-second ads positively target Sens. Patty Murray, Raphael Warnock, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tom Carper, Kyrsten Sinema, Michael Bennett, John Hickenlooper, and Alex Padilla, and also run in Spanish in AZ, CA, and NV.
The NRDC Action Fund is continuing to run YouTube ads in Michigan, spending $6,300 on ads promoting clean energy investment like this one. Additionally, the Environmental Defense Fund spent $1,100 last week on a series of highly geotargeted banner ads thanking various Democratic senators “for going bold on clean energy.”
Snapchat
Once again, the only climate group that ran new ads on Snapchat last week was Patagonia. In the past few days, they’ve spent $514 on ads promoting grant funding for environmental leaders of color through the Conservation Alliance and organizing for an environmental justice rally in Ventura, CA this week. However, Vote No to Protect Maine is steadily spending on the platform as it advocates against Question 1 in Maine through the end of the month. They’ve now spent just over $15k on Snapchat ads.
Overall, here are the top spenders on climate ads on Snapchat so far this year:
Who’s Driving the Online Conversation on Climate Change?
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Occupy Democrats (85.7k interactions), U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (71.9k interactions), and President Joe Biden (45.5k interactions).
It’s not surprising to us that Warren’s post about Biden restoring protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante got a relatively high level of engagement, since a Washington Post story about the move was also the most-engaged article about climate change and related topics last week, earning over 130k interactions.
We also noticed that one climate activist’s disruption of Paris Fashion Week with a banner that read “OVERCONSUMPTION = EXTINCTION” got a fair amount of traction on social media. Stories about her protest and dramatic removal - including from outlets like The Cut, CNN, and the New York Times - by security got just over 12k interactions, and a post about it from HIGHSNOBIETY was the second-most engaged Instagram post about climate last week. Additionally, an IG video from NowThis got over 341k views, and a similar Facebook video from them got another 861k views. NYTimes Fashion also picked up the event, and their IG post performed about as well as their post about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s TAX THE RICH dress.
Additionally, a few of the top Instagram posts about climate change came from Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her recent visit to Italy. There, she participated in a preliminary COP26 meeting and met with the country’s president and prime minister, apparently advocating for climate action all along the way.
Overall, here were the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week:
Before we wrap up, we’d like to point out that right-wing pundits didn’t seem to focus on climate change last week. We only identified a couple of high-performing posts from the likes of The Daily Wire et al; the most-engaged right-wing Facebook post about climate came from Mike Huckabee, but it only got 11.4k interactions. It also looks like their machine tried to manufacture a controversy over the Biden administration’s efforts to accelerate the clean energy transition. The most successful manifestation of this last week was a Breitbart article pointing out the rising price of crude oil that got 38.2k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, while a Daily Wire story and a Daily Caller IG post only got 8.5k and 11.7k interactions, respectively.
Finally, here were the top 3 tweets mentioning climate or energy issues from the last week. It looks like Democrats in Congress are using social media to more openly push for a robust economic agenda that includes strong climate action.
That’s it for Climate Monitor this week. As always, head to climatemonitor.substack.com to see these updates in real time as we publish them throughout the week!
And if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to ClimateMonitor@DCC.org.