Climate Monitor: September 30th
Digital ad spending supporting the Build Back Better Act and its climate provisions continues to grow
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 over a 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:
After a quick pause, it looks like Stand for Children is back running a huge Facebook ad campaign supporting the Build Back Better Act with messaging that emphasizes the package’s equitable economic benefits. Meanwhile, Climate Power spent far less on the platform last week than it did in previous weeks, but it’s now running video ads pressuring Congress to enact clean energy tax credits on top of their Spanish ads criticizing freshman GOP House members for ignoring climate change. EnergyBoom also ran new ads advocating for investing in new irrigation jobs.
Overall, here’s a breakdown of how much pro-BBB advertisers spent on Facebook last week:
Both the League of Conservation Voters and NRDC Action Fund started running new YouTube ads in the past week supporting the Build Back Better Agenda. The former’s new :15s and :30s ads emphasize the economic and climate benefits of the bill, supporting a variety of Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Richard Neal, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Jim McGovern, Frank Pallone, Lauren Underwood, Mikie Sherill, Tom O’Halleran, Susan Wild, Matt Cartwright, Andy Kim, Carolyn Bordeaux, Peter DeFazio, Angie Craig, Steven Horsford, Susie Lee, Elissa Slotkin, Haley Stevens, Antonio Delgado, Chris Pappas, Lucy McBath, Sharice Davids, and Cindy Axne, and Sens. Tom Carper and Maria Cantwell. The NRDC Action Fund is running similar ads supporting Slotkin, Underwood, and Stevens.
Here’s how much these and similar groups spent on political ads on YouTube and Google last week:
More Digital advertising data 📈
Facebook + Instagram
Here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
While some of the biggest climate and conservation groups, such as the LCV and the NRDC Action Fund, have regularly been spending upwards of $100,000 a week on Facebook ads for the past couple of months, more are joining them in using the platform to push for climate action and environmental protection at the federal level. The Wilderness Society and The Wilderness Society Action Fund, for example, spent a combined $167,351 on the platform last week, mostly advocating for Congress to act on climate change and for President Joe Biden to expand protections of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Bears Ears National Monument.
The Green New Deal Network has also recently made a significant increase in their Facebook ad spending recently. They’re targeting ads at constituencies across the country to pressure lawmakers - from Rep. Madison Cawthorn to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - to pass the “$3.5 trillion Build Back Better deal” by laying out the benefits the package would provide to the representatives’ states. One ad reads:
Tell Rep. Cawthorn to stop the obstruction now and support the full Build Back Better deal to:
✅ Creating 178,000 family-sustaining jobs in North Carolina
✅ Funding vital public transit infrastructure
✅ Updating our schools, public buildings, and housing for disaster resiliency
✅ Investing in a clean, renewable, and reliable energy grid
✅ Strengthening the care economy to support families, children, and seniors
Among the climate groups that have launched brand new campaigns in recent weeks is Climate Reality Action Fund, which is now running ads targeting Georgia, Pennsylvania, and the DMV area. They appear to mostly be pressuring Reps. Lucy McBath, Carolyn Bordeaux, Matt Cartwright, with ads supporting the Build Back Better Act, arguing that it “will create good-paying, clean energy jobs we need to put Pennsylvania back to work,” for example. They spent $46,964 on these ads last week.
Meanwhile, Minnesota group The 100% Campaign has started running Facebook ads pressuring Rep. Jim Hagedorn, spending $9,975 last week urging him to “fight for the people, not the corporate elite” and “#SealtheDeal” by voting for Biden’s economic agenda. Lastly, but somewhat unrelatedly, it appears that household goods brand Seventh Generation spent $19,210 on Facebook ads last week pressuring Biden to stop Line 3.
We’re also seeing polluters and fossil fuel advocates increase their spending on Facebook political ads, especially the American Chemistry Council under their page called “America’s Plastic Makers.” The previous week, they spent $10,674, but last week their spending jumped to $157,119 by pushing out dozens of ads arguing against taxes on single-use plastics. Meanwhile, PragerU promoted content that sought to undermine climate science by “parodying the mainstream climate narrative and its ever-changing fear-mongering predictions.”
Click here for more data on the latest ads.
Google and YouTube
On top of using Facebook ads to target a handful of Democratic lawmakers from Georgia and Pennsylvania, it appears that Climate Reality Action Fund is also running their video ads on YouTube with some localized geotargeting. We also found that the Nature Conservancy is now running banner ads targeting lawmakers in Ohio, Nebraska, Maine, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New Hampshire, urging (or thanking) them to support the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Snapchat
Climate groups didn’t start any new campaigns on Snapchat last week, with the exception of Patagonia spending a couple hundred more dollars on the platform advocating for the protection of Baxter State Park & Katahdin National Monument in Maine and the Skagit Headwaters in Washington.
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 Candace Owens (44.k interactions + 326k video views), Townhall (43.7k interactions), and Joe Biden (40.2k interactions).
On Wednesday, musicians, actors, climate activists, and other prominent figures participated in a social media campaign - dubbed #CodeRedClimate - to raise support for climate action in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda ahead of Congressional Democrats’ high-wire act this week. The most impactful figures in the campaign on Facebook were the Foo Fighters, Hillary Clinton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Maroon 5, and Pearl Jam.
We estimate that the campaign’s influencers only generated around 44k interactions on Facebook last week - which is a surprisingly small impact for accounts with such large reach.
By comparison, the top performing political posts on Facebook each week receive around 300,000-500,000 interactions per post.
The campaign had slightly more engagement on Instagram, where the top 17 influencers for #CodeRedClimate generated at least 140k interactions - a still relatively small amount compared to many other political posts on that platform. There, the most impactful accounts were Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine, Maroon 5, Amy Schumer, and Climate Reality. However, it appears that the social media campaign was least impactful on Twitter, where #CodeRedClimate tweets only got around 10k interactions; the most--retweeted post came from Kevin Bacon, but it only got 1.1k retweets.
At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza, Ben Shapiro, and their echo chamber mocked Biden’s address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, where he called the current climate crisis a “code red for humanity.” All told, we estimate that their Facebook posts criticizing the president received nearly 37k interactions.
Another indicator that #CodeRedClimate may not have been impactful on Facebook was how one single post from Turning Point USA - a video in which Candace Owens preaches climate skepticism at a TPUSA conference - got more interactions than the entire Code Red campaign, as did a post from Townhall trying to dunk on late-night hosts’ Climate Night.
While Facebook was rife with counter-programming last week that may have outweighed posts from climate activists, some of the top tweets about climate change last week got hundreds of thousands of interactions thanks to the insanely popular K-Pop boy band BTS. Their climate-focused speech to the UNGA generated tons of earned media attention, and we found that tweets mentioning BTS and climate action last week got over 860k interactions, almost certainly facilitated by the band’s enormous and extremely active global fanbase on social media.
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!
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