Climate Power invests in a new Facebook ad strategy: mom microinfluencers
Plus, a look at local paid digital campaigns in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Washington
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!
What we found:
Climate Power continues to run one of the most creative paid digital campaigns among climate groups. On top of heavily investing in boosted news, they’re now experimenting with running ads through microinfluencer pages.
The online fight over Line 5 in Wisconsin is heating up as Enbridge is once again running Facebook ads supporting themselves, while Action for the Climate Emergency continues to use Facebook ads to organize and raise awareness around the pipeline.
From what we can see, very few candidates for U.S Senate or governor have been running Facebook or Instagram ads about energy or climate change in recent weeks. Most Republican ads seem focused on The Wall or ~Critical Race Theory~ while many Democrats seem more focused on voting rights in their recent ads.
On organic social media, much of the highly engaged Facebook content about climate change and related issues was centered around the one-year mark of Joe Biden’s presidency.
National Digital Ad Spending on Climate
Here are the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Meta platforms from last week:
Last week, Climate Power launched a pretty interesting Facebook ad campaign to advocate for climate action and revamped environmental protections. On top of spending over $45k on boosted news ads - an effective tactic in its own right - they also spent nearly $5k last week running Facebook (but not Instagram) ads through eight microinfluencer pages, every one of them a mom to young kids. These ads, which are mostly targeted across age and gender demographics in California, Florida, Arizona, New Jersey, Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan, lend an incredible amount of authenticity to Climate Power’s message, and might help them reach Facebook users who might otherwise ignore a branded Facebook ad.
Also catching our eye this week are mobile-first Facebook and Instagram ads from the United Nations, which is using its ads to argue that COP26 “kept the 1.5°C goal alive,” and that “we need to increase ambition now and halve global emissions by 2030.” They’re targeting users under 35 nationwide and in the United Kingdom.
Here at home, Action for the Climate Emergency has been running ads on Meta platforms for weeks advocating for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels in Wisconsin. They’ve used their ads to “break up Wisconsin’s energy monopoly” and for President Biden to “Shut down Line 5 and protect Wisconsin from being the next victim of a catastrophic oil spill.” Now, Enbridge itself is back on the board with a revived ad using a simple but subtle message: “Operating in Wisconsin since 1949, we safely transport the energy needed to fuel quality of life.” They spent around $20k on this exact ad last September, but have only spent just over $1k on it so far this year.
(As an aside, it looks like ACE tested an ad connecting potential war in eastern Europe and Russian natural gas. They spent under $200 on an ad mostly targeting teenagers that read, “Want to stop pointless wars? In less than a minute, you can sign our petition to urge Congress to support localized renewable energy to end our involvement in oil-related wars!”)
Google + YouTube
When it comes to Google and YouTube ads, the only outside group that the Google Transparency Report picked up was ClearPath Action Fund, which continues to provide air cover for Sen. Lisa Murkowski with YouTube and banner ads targeting greater Anchorage. Last week, they spent $6,900 on their ads.
Snapchat
While the NRDC Action Fund continues to run its email acquisition campaign on Snap, we did notice that a progressive nonprofit local to Washington State, called Fuse Washington, spent $50 promoting a TikTok on Snapchat highlighting how absurd climate denialism is at this point.
Climate, clean energy, and conservation ads in this year’s key states
We picked up a few new Facebook ads mentioning climate change, conservation, and/or energy in some of the biggest races Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
NH-SEN: Maggie Hassan launched more fundraising ads last week highlighting climate action as a core tenet of her campaign: “If we let Republicans take back the Senate, that means giving up all our hard-earned efforts for reproductive rights, climate change and voting rights.”
NV-SEN: In her first Facebook ads of the new year, Catherine Cortez Masto highlighted President Biden’s steps to address climate change in his first year and Mitch McConnell’s desire to undermine them: “President Biden is taking historic strides to address climate change even as Mitch McConnell and extremist Republicans try to obstruct his every move. With our planet’s future on the line, we need to know where top Democrats stand – but our live poll closes in just a few hours and we’re MISSING your response.”
TX-28: Facing a primary challenge from the left and an FBI investigation, Henry Cuellar launched a bilingual YouTube ad campaign with some bread-and-butter messaging: “I know the American dream can grow here, with good schools, affordable healthcare, and better pay” - with that third point juxtaposed with b-roll of an oil field.
Reaching Frontline Communities
A renewable energy advocacy group local to New Mexico, aptly called ReNew Mexico, has been using Facebook ads to promote wind and solar energy investment in the state since 2020. So far this year, they’ve invested under $1k in a variety of ads, which either provide advocacy resources, dispel clean energy myths, or just generally promote the benefits and opportunities of clean energy. Their ads seem to mostly target young adult men and older women in New Mexico.
Measuring the National Organic Conversation
The top three Facebook posts mentioning climate change and related terms last week came from Barack Obama (81.8k interactions), Heather Cox Richardson (65k interactions), and CALL TO ACTIVISM (30.9K interactions).
Some of the biggest drivers of engagement around climate change on social media last week included typical left-wing actors, both literal and figurative, who excel at driving engagement for its own sake. Across platforms, pages like Occupy Democrats and Call to Activism used their huge followings and algorithm-gaming tactics to get clicks on content advocating for climate action, lauding President Biden and Democrats, and pilloring Republicans. Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, engagement on climate change content on Facebook remained relatively low last week.
The top three Instagram posts mentioning climate change from last week came from Barack Obama, Mark Ruffalo, and National Geographic. Ruffalo, along with fellow actor-cum-activist Leonardo DiCaprio continue to successfully use their huge platforms to draw attention to climate change, with Ruffalo leaning into his Avengers connection and DiCaprio still pushing “Don’t Look Up” more than a month after the film was released. DiCaprio’s IG post about the movie and its message got over 1.8 million views in four days.
The top tweets mentioning climate change from last week all seem to have been driven by pages like Occupy Democrats and their extremely online audience, but like Facebook, engagement on these tweets were relatively low for the platform. But, we will note that one of the top-performing tweets mentioning climate change came from Rep. Katie Porter sharply criticized how much American taxpayers pay to prop up fossil fuel companies.
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 nick@fwiwmedia.com.