Digital ad spending data for the week of September 5 - 11
Top spenders last week include Climate Pledge, Exxon, Climate Power, Science Moms, Wilderness Society
Last week, as many climate groups supporting the Build Back Better agenda continued their digital paid media campaigns, we saw that some - namely Climate Power and The Wilderness Society - expanded their spending. Meanwhile, it looks like BP is once again advertising on Facebook, and a new pro-plastic group also started spending on the platform.
Facebook + Instagram
Before we dig into it, here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
The Wilderness Society and the Wilderness Society Action Fund have been steadily increasing their spending on Facebook political ads over the past couple of weeks. The group is running similar ads - mostly targeting young adults in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico - across both pages that vaguely call for federal climate action using fear of runaway climate change to drive email sign-ups:
“Nature as we know it is running out of time. Climate change threatens all of us, and we have a narrow opportunity to change course. Tell Congress to act NOW.”
A few other ads appear to be running in Spanglish:
“Esto es climate change. It’s NOT some distant threat – es aquí, es ahora and it’s deadly. Tell Congress to act!”
While they’re running these vague call-to-climate-action ads through both pages, they appear to be more specific through their Action Fund. There, they’re pressuring the Democratic senators from AZ, CO, and NM to protect public lands from fossil fuel development.
On the other side of things, BP is resuming its greenwashing PR tactics with Facebook ads targeting mostly older Americans calling for carbon pricing and methane regulations at the federal level. At the same time, BASF - a German multinational company that’s the largest chemical producer in the world - is now running Facebook ads in the U.S. with rhetoric similar to that of other pro-petrochemical companies and organizations. They claim that innovation in plastic development can solve a whole host of big problems, including climate change, world hunger, and pollution. Notably, they’re also running a series of Instagram-only ads that are almost exclusively targeted at young adults on the platform.
Overall, here’s how much climate groups, polluters, and other pages spent on Facebook ads last week.
Google + YouTube
The League of Conservation Voters is still spending huge sums on Google + YouTube advertising week-to-week. Last week, they spent $186,800 on the platform, second among ALL spenders on the platform only to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s anti-recall campaign. They’re still running ads supporting various Democratic representatives in Congress and Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema.
One huge new campaign on YouTube last week came from the “Fund for a Better Future,” a.k.a. Climate Power. They spent $88,200 on YouTube ads against seven freshman Republican representatives - Reps. David Valadao, Maria Salazar, Mike Garcia, Young Kim, Michelle Steel, and Carlos Giménez - lambasting them for ignoring how climate change is impacting their constituents. Check it out:
Snapchat
There were no new political ad campaigns on Snapchat from climate groups, but we’ll note that Amazon’s Climate Pledge, like on other platforms, is continuing to dump a ton of money here, especially compared to how much other groups tend to spend.
Overall, here are the top spenders on climate ads on Snapchat so far this year: