On Tuesday, BP reported a 14-year high profit of £7bn for the second quarter of this year. In the previous eight days, the company paid around £570,000 to Facebook and Instagram for influencer ads that reached tens of millions of viewers in the UK. “These ads are intended to create a clean warm glow for the companies concerned, giving them more social license to operate,” said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace UK. The influence ads, which also highlight BP’s contribution to UK energy security, were launched two days after Labor proposed a surprise tax on North Sea oil and gas in January. BP’s spending on these ads escalated in the weeks before Rishi Sunak announced an “energy profit contribution” on May 26, according to research by Eco-Bot.Net and the Guardian. “Supporting Britain: delivering domestic energy” read many of the ads in green script on a map of the UK. BP ad spend chart “Corporate interests have used advertising for many years to improve their reputation. And when it comes to corporate taxes, reputation matters to politicians,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher of online political communication at New York University. The influencer ads promote BP’s plan to “go to net zero” by phasing out oil and gas production and investing more in “low carbon” and renewable energy. “BP presents itself as offering green solutions that are good for the UK, but these investments are dwarfed by how much money they pour into fossil fuels,” Parr said. “They are doing this while they have record profits and as millions of UK households are pushed into fuel poverty.” BP has some of the most ambitious energy transition plans among major oil and gas companies, but an analysis by Oil Change International in May found that the industry’s plans are not enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels – the goal outlined in the Paris Agreement. “The green investments they describe represent only a small part of current energy production and investment behavior,” said Gregory Trencher, who researches energy policy and sustainability transitions at Kyoto University. “In that sense the ads are misleading.” “It’s like someone who is still in the process of changing to a healthy diet, but who asks to be praised in advance. That doesn’t tell the reader that BP is continuing to open new oil and gas fields,” said Trencher, who describes the ads as “greenwashing.” A BP spokesman said: “The UK is the epitome of our strategy and we are investing heavily here. Our ads highlight the specifics, scope and scale of the things we intend to do here – including offshore wind, North Sea oil and gas, hydrogen and carbon capture and EV charging.” Shell, which announced record profits last month, also paid Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to run dozens of influencer ads this year that reached more than a million viewers in the UK. The ads promoted Shell’s investments in renewable energy charging stations and electric cars, but were not cited by the company as relating to “social issues, elections and politics” – and therefore ran without disclaimers about who was paying for the advertising. “Better transparency to users, for example, who are paying to have this information in front of them, helps them put what they’re seeing in context,” said Edelson, who is also an adviser to the Real Facebook Oversight Board. -a group of activists has been appointed to be considered by Facebook’s supervisory board. Spending and reach information is only disclosed to Meta’s ad library for social issues and political ads, and only those ads remain visible in the library after they expire. The Shell ads investigated were eventually removed by Meta for violating company policy, but the investigation found that dozens of other similar ads had been running without a disclaimer for more than a month, seemingly unnoticed by Meta’s moderation process. A Shell spokesperson said: “Shell aims for clarity, transparency and trust in all our communications. The disclaimer policy applied to Meta ads is something that Shell fully supports. “Initial investigations suggest that the disclaimer was mistakenly not applied to some recent Shell content and we are investigating this with our media buying agency. We have also instructed them to take immediate corrective action.” A Meta spokesperson said: “We require all advertisers who run ads on social issues, including those on environmental issues, to include a ‘paid for’ disclaimer. Our enforcement is not perfect, but we are always working to strengthen and improve our processes.” Eco-Bot.Net scrapes social media ad databases paid for by some of the world’s most polluting companies. The ads are then analyzed by journalists and researchers. Meta offers to put ads in front of specific “custom audiences” based on the detailed user profiles they create. Audiences are segmented based on age, gender, geographic location, income, and many other types of personal data in a practice called “microtargeting.” The analysis found that most of BP’s UK targeted ads this year reached viewers aged between 25 and 44, but a more detailed analysis of targeting practices was not possible based on the data available in Meta’s ad library. Shell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
