Did you know you can search up what companies are advertising on Google via its Ads Transparency Center? Were you also aware that this tool is basically useless?
That's, sadly, one of the main findings of the latest Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) bulletin. CAAD "checked the Ad Transparency Center between 30th November and 4th December 2023 to see whether some of the largest oil and gas companies ran live campaigns" and found a "concerning amount of greenwashing claims, executional greenwashing (nature-rinsing) and woke-washing."
Just about the only quantitative data Google provides is a ballpark figure of the number of ads the company has run. For Saudi Aramco, it was 2,100. Total ran 1,090, ExxonMobil ran 940, Chevron ran 288, and Shell ran 250.
What was in those ads? Well, Saudi Aramco is "pushing gender equality themes in their adverts in multiple countries, including the UK, Germany and India," despite the fact that "the Saudi Arabian regime continues to restrict multiple freedoms for women and girls within the country."
As for ExxonMobil, its "'heavy industry with low emissions' advert in the United States features carbon capture and 'clean energy from hydrogen' as key solutions to decarbonisation. The video places a woman of colour front and centre in the advert, despite the company's management committee consisting entirely of white men until 2021."
Unfortunately, Google's "transparency center" doesn't actually provide much, if any, real "transparency." It doesn’t provide any figures about how much companies spend on ads, so there's no telling if a company just tested an ad once or if it is pouring millions into promoting it. It also doesn't provide much information about time, offering only a "last seen" date, but "no indication of when an advert first ran or for how long."
CAAD even called the interface a "nightmare" because "you cannot search or summarise by keyword. The only option is to manually scroll through an advertiser's back catalogue to find examples." On top of that, "results are inconsistent, making it impossible to accurately compare brands" because "sometimes multiple brands are bundled into one parent company" but "other times they are presented subsidiary-by-subsidiary." So in practice, "a search for 'Exxon' brings up multiple subsidiaries that need to be checked one-by-one, or 'Exxon Mobil Corporation' which contains some, but not all of the ExxonMobil brands within it."
Google calls it an Ads Transparency Center, but since it's just a repository of ads with no additional information, the whole thing seems less about providing transparency and more about crafting the illusion of it.
"One of the largest Big Tech companies should be setting a better standard on ad transparency," CAAD cautions, adding that "policymakers and journalists may want to pressure platforms on their poor transparency, and ask why so little effort has gone into its design."
There are also "gaping loopholes in Terms of Service [that] make Google's search engine, Display network and YouTube platform open season for greenwashing," which begs the question of "whether such a platform should be directly profiting off of such activity."
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: it’s time to hold Google accountable for its role in fueling the climate crisis!
