Why did the oil and gas industry spend $10 million on Facebook advertising in 2020 in the US?
Because it works.
This report lays out how the oil and gas industry use Facebook as a channel to promote their climate friendliness, using misleading content and information that doesn’t align with the science of climate change.
What oil and gas want
The industry wants to slow down the world’s transition to sustainable and renewable energy.
They realise their future is finite and that all they have left is trying to get as much as they can before the music stops. And the longer they can convince legislators not to act on climate change, and the more people they can convince that they are working tirelessly to support the world’s transition to sustainable and renewable energy, the longer they can squeeze that desiccated fossil-fuel lemon.
And, unfortunately, advertising is pretty good at convincing people of ‘facts’ that aren’t true.
We lie to ourselves
Michael Gazzaniga spent much of his career examining how the cerebral hemispheres pass information to one another. If you’re interested in this topic, this article is a great read.
What Gazzaniga found was that when we are faced with an incomplete picture of what is happening around us, our brains jump in and fill in the gaps to bring cohesion and a narrative to why things are happening, or why we’re behaving in the way we are. Gazzaniga developed the idea that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for ‘psychological unity’. It takes all the inputs of the world around us and pulls these together into a narrative we understand and can accept. And as the brain fills in the blanks, we tend not to question the story we’re being presented – as long as the story adequately fits what we’re experiencing and expect in a moment.
The left hemisphere of the brain is constantly working, narrating to our conscious minds a version of the world we’re experiencing that makes sense to us. If our brains weren’t doing this, the world would be bewildering. Our understanding of why things happen would be virtually non-existent. The world would seem to be a place with endless magical, overwhelming, and unrelated events that just happen and keep on happening.
And in the same way our brains tell us the story of what is happening around us, our brains are also responsible for telling us what we’re doing and why. In Mistakes were Made (but not by me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson examine how we use self-justification to create explanations for our actions that make them acceptable to us. We all make assertions about what is happening and what we’ve done as facts. But what we don’t realise is that we’re blind to how subjective our perceptions of the world and our actions really are. Our minds create a narrative about the world based on the kind of person we believe ourselves to be, and the world as we believe we’re inhabiting. Essentially, we make up reality based on what we think should be happening.
And we accept this reality unquestioningly.
Our brains make up stories about the world and we adopt and label these as ‘facts’.
The way we see the world, and the reasons behind our actions are all fabricated narratives delivered to us by the left hemisphere of our brains. Stories told to us by our minds about what the world is really like. Our view of reality is a shadow of what is actually out there. Except for a few moments of insanity, or drug induced clarity, we never really see the world as it is. We are constantly being told a story of what is happening, and we call that ‘truth’.
Why?
In Mistakes were Made (but not by me) Tavris and Aronson explain that the self-justification process exists as a self-preservation mechanism.
“Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take.”
Tavris & Aronson
Foundational ideas such as, I’m a good person, I’m not a liar, I care about other people, I’m not selfish are essential in helping us keep our shit together. And when these ideas about ourselves take a knock, we struggle to understand why we did something that goes against how we define, something we might not be proud of.When that happens, we seek reassurance, usually from others, that we aren’t bad people. And it takes time before we allow ourselves to believe the forgiving narrative our brains are trying to feed us. In those moments of shame and disappointment the psychological burden of having to deal with what we did can feel insurmountable, until it doesn’t.
How does advertising come into this?
I have never met a person with a psychological make-up that does not include an intrinsic belief in their own free will. We all believe that we have the capacity to choose between different options in life. The world might impose pressure on us to make some decisions over others, but in the end, it’s still us that makes the choice.
For instance, you might have a job digging trenches. You dig every day because it pays the bills, but you know you still have the choice to not dig that trench today. Instead, you might decide to smack your boss over the head with your shovel and tell him to dig the damn trench himself.
Because our existence and the way we see the world is predicated on the belief that we have free will and the ability to choose what we want for ourselves, it is difficult to accept that our decisions might be manipulated by something as trivial as advertising. Add to that the positive connotations people have around having a mind of one’s own, and it becomes very difficult to accept that our actions and purchases can in any way be something that’s not controlled by ourselves.
However, the truth is people buy stuff because they see ads that make them want to buy those products. In the same way people see ads for the oil and gas industry and they are led to believe that oil and gas are doing good in the world.
However, when you ask the person who bought that Louis Vuitton briefcase, supports BP, and voted for Trump, why they did all those things they will offer you a story, which they believe wholeheartedly, that they feel reasonably justifies their actions, and it won’t have anything to do with Facebook ads.
Most, if not all, of us believe that other people might be influenced by advertising and propaganda, but we make our decisions rationally, based on facts.
We’re lying to ourselves.
We post rationalise and self-justify our actions so that we don’t have to face the reality that we are easily manipulated and far weaker minded than we would like to believe.
And the ad industry would prefer it if you didn’t know that advertising works
It is because we don’t believe that we are able to be swayed by something as silly as advertising that advertising exists. If we came to understand the impact ads, PR and propaganda have on our lives and on the way we think, we would be far more wary about how we engage with promotional corporate messages.
We might even force our governments to legislate against being advertised to.
It is in the ad industry’s (and capitalism’s) interest that we believe we’re immune to advertising. That we continue to think that the ‘free will’ narrative behind our actions is true. That we make our choices rationally and that we are resolutely steadfast in our ability to decide for ourselves without be swayed by others.
“The Devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire.