Marketplace Advocacy Campaigns: Generating Public Support for Bus ...

engage in a dialog on energy issues. A campaign billboard, for example, portrayed a large index card with “willyoujoinus” in the center. The text below it explained that “willyoujoinus.com houses a full exploration of the energy issues, where people can come together and form a more pragmatic point of view” (Effie Worldwide, 2007).

Television advertising, meanwhile, focused on the world’s expanding population and growing energy needs. One television ad features baby carriages traveling like cars on streets, roads, and sidewalks, from Paris to Rome to the countryside and the desert. The narrator explains, “In the next 20 years, the world will grow by one and a half billion people. Feeding this appetite for energy will take innovation, collaboration, and conservation. We’ve begun creating this new era of energy. Will you join us?”

Another television ad features the impact of wind in a variety of everyday situations—blowing a man’s hat down the street, blowing napkins from a café dining table, and blowing away a man’s newspaper while he sits on a park bench to read—as the voiceover explains the limitations of wind energy.

The ad concludes with an image of a large wind turbine atop the Eiffel Tower.

Although the campaign utilized mainstream media channels for the delivery of its message to mass audiences, it also sought to increase advocacy efforts among individuals who “determine the exploration, extraction and delivery of energy around the world”—people referred to as “energy influentials” (Effie Worldwide, 2007). Evaluation research identified not only an increase in Chevron reputation metrics among those people who were exposed to the campaign, but also an overall improvement in industry standing and an increase in advocacy efforts by 127%.²

An evolution of Chevron’s “Real Issues” campaign was subsequently launched in 2007. Similar to the “Real Issues” campaign, Chevron’s