"Passionate, Relatable, Authentic" - Big Oil Buying Influencers For An Image Makeover

[hatrack]

Uh . . . . OK.

EDIT

After a months-long trawl through the inner depths of the internet, DeSmog has discovered hundreds of examples of fossil fuel giants paying influencers, in an attempt to convince millennials that oil and gas companies are not “the bad guys”. This was BP’s concern in 2020, when it organised an internal summit to address its poor public perception. In a leaked document from the conference, the company stated its desire to become “more relatable, passionate, and authentic beyond our current centre of influence.” “What is meaningful empathy in a world where we’re seen as one of the bad guys?” the document lamented.

The solution, it seems, was not to urgently transition away from fossil fuels towards green, renewable energy. Rather, BP said that it needed to change its PR strategy to help “win the trust of the younger generation”. Our investigation found that both BP and Shell have been major sponsors of influencers in recent years, funding campaigns that have reached billions of people.

EDIT

Fast forward to 2021, and Shell’s online advertising efforts ramped up even further. Its Pitch the Future campaign, run by the agency EssenceMediacom, won the top spot at the World Media Group annual awards ceremony. The idea behind the campaign was to challenge students to solve real-life energy problems, with the best innovations handed prize money by the fossil fuel giant. The campaign was fronted by a couple of recognisable faces: British inventor Colin Furze, who has 12.5 million followers on YouTube, and US influencer Astronaut Abby, a Gen Z science enthusiast who has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and 52,000 on TikTok.

EDIT

“These public messaging efforts form part and parcel of a broader greenwashing strategy of which the objective is to portray Shell as a global champion in the energy transition,” Gregory Trencher, an associate professor at the graduate school of global environmental studies, Kyoto University, told DeSmog. “Yet this is far from the reality, as despite having a goal in place to reach net zero emissions, Shell has abandoned its plan to reduce its production of oil by 1-2% each year up to 2030 and it has reaffirmed plans to grow its gas production.” This obfuscation of reality seems particularly dangerous when carried out by influencers. Shell’s dubious claims are easy to spot when they are disseminated by corporate suits and beige press releases. They are harder to identify and debunk when they are sprinkled into our feeds by people who specialise in captivating armies of online admirers. As Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny: “The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights”. And fossil fuel giants have a tonne of money to burn.

EDIT

https://novaramedia.com/2023/07/27/fossil-fuel-companies-are-paying-influencers-to-do-their-pr/

[Think. Again.]

1. Yes...

The fossil fuel industry has been paying people to mis- & dis-inform the public for decades.

Pretending to be in with all sorts of different groups or mindsets is the first step, gaining empathy and trust, and then slowly sowing doubt, confusion, and eventually building firm positions againt the renewable energy industry (or any individualsector of it) with people who would have normally used common sense if they hadn't been intentionally and carefully misled.