Climate Monitor: October 7th
Digital ad spending by climate groups, polluters declined sharply last week
Climate-action groups are deploying online tactics 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:
Best performing Facebook post from DCC members: Yale Program on Climate Communication
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. Spending decreased last week from the previous week, as we discuss in our digital ads roundup below.
Stand for Children is leaning very heavily into the Child Tax Credit, and several other groups - including climate groups - are also focusing on how the Build Back Better Act will redistribute wealth from the wealthy back down to the middle and lower classes. Climate Power, for example, is now running YouTube ads targeting the Washington, DC media market that highlights how voters want the wealthy to pay for investments in clean energy jobs.
And, here’s a breakdown of how much advertisers in the pro-BBB outside group coalition spent on Google + YouTube ads last week. Note that the League of Conservation Voters and Priorities USA have stopped their campaigns that supported Sen. Maggie Hassan.
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
Here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
Many groups that have been running Facebook ads focused on energy or the environment - including both climate groups and polluter accounts - have scaled back their campaigns on the platform. The Wilderness Society, the Green New Deal Network, the NRDC Action Fund, and the American Wind Energy Association are among those who are currently only running a handful of ads as of this writing. However, we found that the LCV and the Alliance for Climate Education have launched new Facebook ad campaigns focused on youth engagement.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies themselves are still running Facebook ads advocating against increasing taxes on fossil fuel companies and their products by arguing that the cost of those taxes would be passed directly to the consumer. ExxonMobil, for example, has stopped most of its Facebook ads except ones that argue against the “Plastic Tax” that they claim would result in “$120 BILLION in increased costs for American families.” Similarly, API has been running Facebook ads claiming that “politicians in DC want to increase the cost of American-Made energy.”
Click here for more data on the latest ads.
Google + YouTube
LCV is still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on YouTube ads every week; last week, they spent $210,700. They’re now running ads supporting or pressuring more Democratic lawmakers around the Build Back Better Act. Many of these ads are not targeted at respective constituencies in their entirety, and are instead geotargeted at specific collections of zip codes or voting precincts. The Nature Conservancy is also running new banner ads targeting Florida that pressure Murphy to support the BBB Act.
We also found that the Arizona Petroleum Marketers Association is now running the same ad that their Nevada equivalent ran earlier this month that argues that the Biden administration’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy is actually a broken promise to not raise taxes on the middle class.
Snapchat
Once again, Patagonia appears to be the only group that has recently run ads about climate change and conservation. Their ads attempted to organize volunteers in Prescott, AZ, and Boulder, CO, for local demonstrations.
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 UNICEF (82.2k interactions), Breitbart (51.1k interactions), and Breitbart (35.1k interactions).
Last week, in the absence of environmental disasters or organized climate action campaigns, there didn’t seem to be many overarching conversations about climate change on social media last week that were tied to a specific event. One incident we did notice, though, followed remarks from Greta Thunberg at a youth climate activism conference, in which she lambasted the U.K. and India for their lack of material climate action. An Instagram post from The Guardian about her speech was the second-most engaged post about climate change on the platform last week, and a Breitbart piece mocking Thunberg was one of the most-engaged Facebook posts and articles about climate last week. NPR and NowThis also made successful posts about Thunberg’s speech.
Another trend we noticed was one that seems quite common regardless of the greater news cycle, as last week several posts and stories about climate action developments got a significant amount of engagement. These include a story of the Danish repurposing wind turbine blades as bike shelters that got 92.7k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, and a VICE News Instagram post about new environmental protections in Australia got over 50k interactions. However, the second-most engaged story about climate last week - at 55.2k interactions - was an NPR report on the declared extinctions of more than 20 species.
Last week, the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week came from President Biden, the Guardian, and VICE.
A few of the most-engaged tweets came from accounts of Democratic lawmakers and climate activists, but many came from a man named Peter Imanuelsen. He claims to be a Swedish journalist even though he’s neither, and he claims to love nature and the environment even though he uses Twitter to mock climate action. One of his tweets from last week called activists “climate change fanatics” while another was a poor satire of climate regulation, but both tweets got tens of thousands of interactions.
Overall, here were the top 3 tweets mentioning climate or energy issues from the last week.
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.