Global Warming Ad Series: Ultimate Target Seems Clear

It’s a strange business, this effort to turn public opinion on the subject of global warming. Take, for example, the just-concluded series of television advertisements reducing the complexities of the debate to 30-second spots intended to scuttle any international agreement.

They were shown over two months leading up to the talks now underway in Kyoto, Japan, aimed at producing such a pact by Wednesday.

One showed the price of a gallon of gasoline being raised to $1.79 from $1.29. Another depicted an oversized scissors cutting China out of a world map, a bid to drive home the prospect that an accord on global warming might not apply to developing nations.

Were they effective?

“The advertising program worked in crystallizing people’s opinions,” said Red Cavaney, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s lobbying arm in Washington.

Well, not exactly.

One poll found that only 6% of the population recalled seeing the ads--and of that 6%, two-thirds said the commercials did not influence them.

But that wasn’t the point.

Even if public opinion was not immediately swayed by the $13-million campaign sponsored by oil, auto and coal firms and several labor unions, the money was hardly wasted. That’s because the ultimate target of the ads is reflected in their display: The spots ran on CNN and in time slots adjacent to Sunday morning public affairs programs, outlets that attract Washington politicians and policy wonks.

“Issue advocacy advertising of this sort does not have attitude change by the public as its objective,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “They’re not trying to influence the public. They’re trying to influence” policymakers and legislators.

The ads seek to do so, Jamieson said, by “creating the illusion” that they reflect public concern. That is why such advertising is known in the political communication business as “Astroturf TV”: It looks like real grass-roots lobbying, but it is synthetic.

The global-warming ads came with a notable pedigree. They were put together by the Goddard Claussen agency, a Malibu public affairs company. It created the “Harry and Louise” ads that, by using actors to portray a worried middle-aged couple, were so effective in raising skepticism about President Clinton’s bid to reform the health care system four years ago.

The central elements in the global-warming series were predictions of shockingly higher gasoline prices, the exemption of developing nations from any role in curbing climate change and the failure of small businesses as a result of higher energy costs.

Such results have not been established as inevitable in whatever might emerge from Kyoto. But an industry-sponsored study cited in the ads portrayed each as possible, and that was enough to give the assertions an aura of indisputable fact.

Did they succeed? On this, two people whose views have little else in common on global warming find agreement: Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, an environmental education organization, and Ben Goddard, whose agency created the ads.

The ads reached television screens just as the Clinton administration was putting together its negotiating position, which drew sharp criticism from environmentalists who said it did not go far enough to counter the effects of global warming.

“The president began to adopt that position once we started our campaign,” Goddard said.

Clapp concurred.

The advertising, he said, “was effective not in moving the public but in moving the White House. That’s why you’ve seen such a weak position out of the White House.”