Inside climate groups’ recent six-figure digital push supporting Build Back Better
And, how Coca-Cola is using Facebook and Instagram ads to improve its sustainability brand with young adults
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:
The League of Conservation Voters spent around $150,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads in November supporting the Build Back Better Act that target specific members of Congress, nearly half of their overall spend on the platform last month.
Other climate groups that used Facebook ads to support the bill last week include Climate Reality Action Fund, EDF Action, and the NRDC Action Fund.
ExxonMobil spent over $330k on Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Ohio that claim that the oil and natural gas industry provides billions in wages and economic activity to those states.
Coca-Cola spent over $220k on Facebook and Instagram ads touting a variety of sustainability efforts to young adults nationwide.
In the absence of high-performing content mentioning climate change from climate groups and Democrats around the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, disinformation and bad-faith content from the likes of Breitbart and Newsmax thrived.
National Digital Ad Spending on Climate
Here are the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
The League of Conservation Voters spent a whopping $282,590 on Facebook and Instagram in November, and much of that investment appears to have gone into ads promoting the Build Back Better Act in a variety of ways. They’ve spent ~$18k on video ads since Oct. 27 applying positive pressure to Sens. Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Raphael Warnock, as well as ~$90k thanking 21 Democratic House members for voting to pass the bill; the latter ads seem to mostly target older women in the members’ respective states. They also spent ~$45k criticizing eight mostly freshman House Republicans and, interestingly, Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who was the lone House Democrat to vote against BBB.
Similarly, Climate Reality Action Fund has so far spent $28,092 on Facebook and Instagram ads thanking Reps. Elaine Luria, Abigail Spanberger, Susan Wild, Matt Cartwright, Lucy McBath, and Carolyn Bordeaux for voting to pass the bill. Other groups that ran ads on this platform after the BBB Act passed out of the House include EDF Action and the NRDC Action Fund, which respectively spent $7,272 and $32,568 on the platform last week.
Among polluters, the most prominent investor in political ads on Facebook and Instagram continues to be ExxonMobil, which appears to have spent $334,124 on ads targeting Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Ohio touting how the oil and natural gas industry provided billions in wages in each state since 2019. These ads mostly target younger men and older women in each state.
At the same time, we found that Coca-Cola - one of the biggest plastic polluters in the world - has spent $222,710 in the past month touting their sustainability efforts, from “lightweighting our packaging, increasing recycled content, focusing on refillable, fountain and Coca-Cola Freestyle solutions, and investing in local recycling programs,” to “unveiling our first-ever beverage bottle made from 100% plant-based plastic, excluding the cap and label.” Their ads primarily target young adults nationwide, but particularly in California.
Additionally, here’s how much major groups have spent week-to-week on Facebook ads related to climate, conservation, and energy.
As far as we can tell, spending on Google and YouTube ads by climate groups in the past two weeks has been sparse. LCV spent just $3,900 on the platform last week on three YouTube ads they’ve been running since October supporting Sens. Cortez-Masto, Hassan, and Kelly and the BBB Act, and NC WARN spent $10,800 on its campaign pressuring Gov. Roy Cooper against Duke Energy.
We also noticed that Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy ran no ads on the platform last week. We will also note that Building Back Together spent $3,600 on YouTube ads, some of which target key battlegrounds and highlight how the IIJA will replace lead pipes.
Climate spending on Snapchat was similarly sparse on Snapchat over the past two weeks, when Patagonia was still the only climate spender on the platform. They spent $411 on ads highlighting food waste in Southern California and resiliency in Quail Springs in Ventura County, CA.
There were no new climate, conservation, or clean energy-related political ads on Snapchat last week, but here’s how much the biggest spenders have invested in the platform so far this year:
Climate, clean energy, and conservation ads in next 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.
AZ-GOV: Last month, Matt Salmon spent under $100 on an email acquisition ad: “APPROVAL POLL: Biden’s presidency has brought us higher gas and grocery prices, Americans stranded in Afghanistan, chaos at the border, and more COVID mandates.”
FL-GOV: Charlie Crist continued to run fundraising ads criticizing Gov. Ron DeSantis: “Governor Ron DeSantis is a NO on preventing climate change, a NO on preparing for its effects, and a NO on protecting the Everglades. That’s reason enough for Floridians to say NO to giving him a second term!”
MN-GOV: Earlier last month, Scott Jensen ran an email acquisition ad criticizing Gov. Tim Walz: “We need to support GOOD jobs in Minnesota that support energy independence. Scott Jensen supports support [sic] iron ore and precious metals mining, along with pipeline construction!”
NH-SEN: Maggie Hassan started running nine new fundraising ads: “What’s at stake if we give up and allow McConnell and the GOP to take back the Senate? An end to the progress we’ve made on guaranteeing access to the ballot box, securing a woman’s right to choose and battling the climate crisis. If they take this one seat, all our work on behalf of Democratic values will be lost.”
PA-SEN: Malcolm Kenyatta started running 34 new fundraising ads this week: “I’m certain with your help, we can take our movement for affordable childcare, climate justice, and livable wages to the Senate.”
WI-SEN: Last month, Alex Lasry spent ~$1k boosting a local news story about clean energy union jobs: “Hire local and hire union. This is a great example of how we can use green energy to move our economy forward.”
Reaching Frontline Communities
The New Georgia Project, while also running dozens of GOTV Facebook and Instagram ads around Atlanta’s recent mayoral election, also spent around $4k on a campaign in partnership with Patagonia promoting their “Black & Green Agenda.” The video ads highlight the prevalence of lead pipes in Georgia’s public schools, and lead to this landing page that outlines how the project is seeking environmental justice.
Measuring the National Organic Conversation
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Reuters (14k interactions), Reuters (13.2k interactions), and Business Insider (13.2k interactions).
Unsurprisingly, engagement on posts about climate change was low across the board last week, largely due to folks logging off around Thanksgiving. Even a post from President Joe Biden about the Build Back Better Act only got just over 12k interactions. We suspect that the general lack of engagement may be attributable to social media managers pushing less content last week anticipating lower levels of engagement, but we also found that there were also far fewer relevant articles for users to engage with in the first place. Last week just 13.6k articles mentioning climate change were published, versus 28.4k articles the previous week, according to NewsWhip.
However, we did find that the two most-engaged articles that mention climate change came from Breitbart and Newsmax, raking in 26.6k and 22.3k cumulative interactions respectively. Breitbart implicitly criticized President Biden as hypocritical and out-of-touch after he cited savings on gas by owners of electric vehicles - a talking point that right-wing media also successfully dug into after Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm made a similar comment in May. Newsmax, on the other hand, practically lauded Sen. Joe Manchin for his corrosive opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from The Washington Post (64k interactions), NowThis News (61.4k interactions), and Breitbart (47.2k interactions).
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. The top two tweets refer to a completely false story about Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but nonetheless feed the narrative that Democrats are lying about climate change to better themselves.
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.