Digital ad spending data for the week of July 11 - 17
Top spenders last week include The Climate Pledge, Exxon, Volvo, Geothermal, Potential Energy Coalition, and LCV
Spending on climate, environment, and energy ads on Facebook and Google grew across the board over the past week, with climate groups increasing their spending the most thanks in large part to The Climate Pledge, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Potential Science Coalition.
Facebook + Instagram
Before we dig into it, here are the top 25 spenders on climate ads on Facebook and Instagram from last week:
Last week, we reported on the Amazon-backed Climate Pledge launching a huge Facebook campaign calling CEOs to invest in clean energy, and as we suspected, the group was the biggest spender on the platform among climate groups. It was also one of the biggest spenders on Facebook political ads - period - last week, outspent only by Facebook and Amazon itself.
That said, they’re still running the same ads from the beginning of their campaign for now. Meanwhile, Science Moms, the Facebook page run by the Potential Energy Coalition has launched a new ad campaign targeting five states with upcoming competitive U.S. Senate elections: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.
They’re pushing for climate action by arguing in their ads - most of which are recycled from their campaigns from earlier this year - that “If we want our kids to live safe, healthy lives, we have to stop polluting. Another video ad from Science Moms presses the importance of listening to “99% of climate scientists” for “why we must take action on climate change!” Potential Energy Coalition has spent $42,626 on this campaign so far, and their ads almost exclusively target women in the above five states.
The biggest spender on Facebook ads among polluters last week was ExxonMobil, which launched a new campaign advertising an “Exxchange Energy Trivia Center,” in an apparent attempt to gamify their PR while collecting emails and phone numbers. We estimate that they’ve only spent about $3,000 on the campaign so far, and it appears that they’re mostly targeting young adults and older Americans nationwide. Unsurprisingly, the “trivia challenge” is littered with rhetoric talking up fossil fuels and ExxonMobil.
Overall, here’s how much climate groups, polluters, and other pages spent on Facebook ads last week:
Google + YouTube
When it comes to Google and YouTube advertising, the League of Conservation Voters is still the only climate group spending on the platform as reported by the Google Transparency Report. They spent a whopping $54,100 on YouTube ads last week - rivalling the $54,400 they spent the week before the 2020 elections - on ads targeting key Democratic lawmakers in Washington and a brand new nationwide ad pushing for bold climate action in the American Jobs Plan.
We also noticed that the Sixteen Thirty Fund, an opaque progressive advocacy nonprofit, ran a pair of Google Search ads for Evergreen that push for a civilian climate corps. It looks like they spent anywhere from $100 to $1,000 on these ads, which were shown nationwide.
Snapchat
We noticed two new campaigns from climate groups on Snapchat. Patagonia spent $1,642 on ads targeting zip codes northwest of Los Angeles organizing for an environmental justice march in Ventura, Ca., while the Sierra Club has so far spent $1,946 on the platform advertising major utilities’ dependence on fossil fuels. Their ads lead to a landing page that lets users find out how poorly their utilities rate when it comes to transitioning to clean energy. Their ads target a variety of metro areas across the country, including St. Louis, Charlotte, Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
Thanks to Patagonia’s new campaign, they are now the second-largest spender on climate ads on Snapchat in 2021. Here’s how much groups have spent so far this year.