Teen Vogue! Yes!! Great Article On Fossil Fuel Greenwashing Targeting Young Americans

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Oil is in crisis, and youth-centric ads are an attempt at a fix. In January, CNBC talking head Jim Cramer said that young people have given up on companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, believing they can never be sustainable. This has driven down stock prices and scared away investors, including Cramer himself. "We’re in the death knell phase,” he said. “I’m done with fossil fuels.”

Two in three teenagers today say the oil industry creates problems rather than solves them. And like Gomez, few young people want to work for oil companies. Only one in four teenagers say they find such jobs even somewhat appealing. This is creating a real challenge for oil companies. The number of petroleum engineering students is dropping, threatening a shortage of qualified workers. The problem is so severe that analysts have suggested replacing retiring engineers with artificial intelligence. “The younger generation, led by the millennials, have a profound sense of social justice,” said Parsley Energy CEO Matt Gallagher at an oil and gas industry conference in February. “It needs to be part of the fabric of the companies that they go to work for and also the companies that they interact with and they buy from.”

By and large, oil firms are trying to rectify this problem, in part, by avoiding mention of their core product — gasoline, the stuff you put in your car. In the first three months of 2020, ExxonMobil posted 10 videos to YouTube. Six of them dealt with renewable energy, biofuel or electric cars. Shell posted five videos in the same period. Every one of them covered ways to cut carbon emissions. Imagine if Arby’s bragged about everything on its menu except roast beef. That’s more or less what oil companies are doing.

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Chris Ferris, a marketing lecturer at Rice University, showed this video to his 14-year-old and 17-year-old. The pro-gas message made their eyes roll, he said. This is the difficulty of marketing to social media-savvy teenagers. “They have a more highly attuned BS meter,” Ferris said. “If a company or a brand doesn’t seem authentic, but seems fake, they will sniff that out in a hot minute.” That’s the problem with authenticity. You can’t fake it. So while it’s easy for companies to say they are fighting climate change, young viewers are going to be skeptical. “If an oil and gas company called me up and asked for my advice, I would say that, if you are trying to promote yourself as a more environmentally-friendly company, you have to actually do the work,” Ferris said. “You can’t just put an ad out on social media and think that it’s going to be bought.”

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https://www.teenvogue.com/story/oil-companies-social-media-greenwashing