Greenpeace vs Gazprom: The Campaign - Part 2

A tactical analysis of the utilisation of environmental tifosi to combat Arctic drilling in the Champions League’s most important fixture. Read the whole series here.

By Jake Cohen

UEFA locked in its six primary sponsors in July 2012, with Gazprom earning the final slot. Sports marketing firm IMR estimates that Heineken, another primary sponsor of the Champions League, pays UEFA over £43m per year for the three-year sponsorship. While the official figures are not published, it’s reasonable to infer that Gazprom is paying close to what Heineken is paying.

Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller spoke about the UEFA sponsorship, stating “Gazprom is not only the largest gas company in the world, but also one of those most passionate about football. Now we have joined the UEFA Champions League - the leading European club football competition. I am sure this cooperation will improve Gazprom’s reputation and advance our brand awareness to a fundamentally new level on the global scale.”

The Champions League’s ability to reach people and raise awareness all over the globe is one of the few things that Greenpeace and Gazprom would seemingly agree on. In fact, when I spoke with Greenpeace’s Ian Duff, he said “the Champions League is a fantastic stage, and Greenpeace is always looking for the best and biggest stages for us to have our conversation and get our point across about the things that matter to us and our supporters.”

In addition to sponsoring the Champions League, Gazprom is also a major sponsor of Chelsea, Schalke 04, Zenit Saint Petersburg, and Red Star Belgrade. The first three clubs have all advanced to first knockout round in this year’s competition.

Gazprom’s ties to football run even deeper than the Champions League and club kit sponsorship. Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich sold his 73% stake in Sibneft, another oil company, to Gazprom for almost £8 billion. The acquisition of Sibneft allowed Gazprom to become the second-largest oil company in the world, behind only Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil enterprise in Saudi Arabia.

For Greenpeace, there is the added benefit of catching Gazprom by surprise, as “the last place [Gazprom] would expect is to be embarrassed is on their big day” during the Champions League. As Duff astutely points out, “Gazprom has spent millions on this sponsorship, and part of why they’re doing that is because [the corporate executives] want to take some of their favourite people to visit the cities hosting Champions League games and watch the games in the luxury boxes.”

It should come as no surprise then that Gazprom specifically targeted the group stage match between Basel and Schalke at St. Jakob Park for a banner-hanging mission, as UEFA president Michel Platini was in attendance. While it’s unlikely that hanging a banner will dissuade Platini from working with Gazprom in the future if the oil company remains willing to pay the hefty sponsorship fee, it just might be enough to tip the scales against Gazprom should UEFA be inundated with requests from other companies wishing to be one of the six primary UEFA sponsors during the next round of sponsorship bidding in 2015.

As Duff explains, protests on the street outside of Gazprom headquarters is something that the oil company sees everyday and is something that Gazprom has planned for, so the Champions League campaign has surely caught the oil company off guard.

Duff notes “Gazprom tries to use their sponsorship of these events to portray themselves as responsible members of society, and as ‘the good guys,’ and we need to challenge that. We’re trying to take away their ability to build their brand and their reputation in front of mainstream society. [Gazprom] is there to show off, and if we can be there to embarrass them in front of the people who are clearly important to them, then that’s a very good thing. They were just sort of rubbing their hands with glee at the reach they were going to get with the Champions League sponsorship.”

In order to carry on their activities, Duff points out that they need permission from society, “mostly from politicians and investors, but also from the general public.” Duff specifically highlights Shell, another oil company Greenpeace targets, as an example of a company that “feels the pressure of public opinion and feels the pressure when regulators and investors are asking for something different.”

Shell, however, is run by shareholders and its largest stockholder, the Capital Group, owns less than ten percent of the company. Gazprom is also publicly traded, but the Russian government owns just over fifty percent of the shares, making it the majority shareholder and essentially the sole decision-maker at Gazprom. This is an extremely important distinction to make between the two companies, as Shell’s executive decision-makers are beholden to its shareholders, while their counterparts at Gazprom are only beholden to the Russian government.

As the world has seen in the lead-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Russian government has shown itself largely unwilling to bend to external pressure with regards to changing a social policy.

While Greenpeace would likely point to the release of the ‘Arctic 30’ as an example of Russia’s susceptibility to external pressure, these are much different situations. Briefly, in September 2013, twenty-eight Greenpeace activists and two journalists were arrested and detained by the Russian government after the activists attempted to board Gazprom’s drilling platform in the Prirazlomnaya field. Greenpeace asserts that the activists were attempting to hang a protest banner.

The following day, the Russian FSS (a loose equivalent of the United States’ FBI) boarded Greenpeace’s ship, the Arctic Sunrise, via helicopter and arrested thirty people. The Russian government originally charged the group with piracy, but the charges were later amended to “attempted hooliganism,” which reduced the maximum sentence from fifteen to seven years imprisonment. The charges were eventually dropped, and the group was released in December under a new amnesty law that the New York Times (among many others) believes was specifically enacted to move the Greenpeace and other high-profile politically charged cases out of the spotlight in advance of the Sochi Olympics.

There was massive international support for the 'Arctic 30’ from the grassroots level to heads of state, and while the external pressure coupled with the Sochi Olympics on the horizon likely led to Russia’s decision to not prosecute the activists, there is a major difference between declining to prosecute a handful of peaceful protestors and completely reversing the national energy policy. As evidenced by Russia’s shameful treatment of its LGBT citizens in the face of extraordinary international pressure to change, when there’s an issue Russia deems important, the outcry from the international community, no matter how loud it may be, will not influence their decision-making.

Given Russia’s unwillingness to bend to pressure when the entire world is watching, it is extremely unlikely that they will abandon a £3.6 billion investment and its strategic foothold in the Arctic simply because of activities conducted by environmental tifosi, however ingenious those activities may be. Greenpeace knows this, and is this campaign is about raising awareness and causing a bit of embarrassment for Gazprom more than getting Gazprom out of the Arctic immediately.

As Duff says, “we think it’s our job to try and take away any opportunity that [Gazprom] has to make themselves look like a good member of the community.”

Greenpeace has a keen self-awareness of its brand image, and is fully cognizant of the fact that many (if not most) football supporters do not care much about environmental issues. Duff readily admits that “the Champions League audience is a tough audience for us, and it’s not our natural environment.”

Greenpeace specifically tailored the campaign to football supporters, because they know that if we were to just laugh at the campaign and dismiss it out of hand as a bunch of granola-eating tree-huggers messing about with our football, then the message would be lost and the campaign would be much less effective. This is not to say that those of us who enjoy the beautiful game are uniquely apathetic of course, but rather that environmental concerns are do not rate very highly with regards to issues the general public is concerned about.

Indeed, according to the most recent Eurobarometer, published in December 2013, environmental issues rank tenth of thirteen issues of importance facing citizens of European Union member states, and only six percent of Europeans rank environmental issues as one of the two most important issues they face. Further, in a Eurobarometer focusing specifically on environmental issues published in 2008, only three percent of Europeans stated that they were “very active” with regards to engaging in environmentally-friendly behaviour.

Greenpeace specifically wanted to incorporate humour as a way to reach football supporters. Duff explains “certain efforts are not just about hanging a banner to raise awareness of some environmental cause, but rather can simply be about “using comedy and timing to great effect. Humour and the ability to not always take things too seriously can be a very good way to reach audiences.”

As an example, Greenpeace activist managed to sneak a banner into the Real Madrid press conference in Demark prior to their group stage match against Copenhagen. They deployed the banner via remote control just as Pepe and a bemused Carlo Ancelotti were about to answer a question from a journalist. If you watch the video, you’ll likely get a chuckle out of it, and that is exactly the reaction Greenpeace is hoping for.

Duff explains that “what we’re trying to do in these sorts of instances is intervening in a way that’s as creative as possible and generate content that we are then able to use to reach a much wider audience.”

Duff notes that the Champions League has very strict rules about not broadcasting protests, so Greenpeace was faced with the added challenge of “how to generate compelling content from our protests that people will want to look at and want to share.”

“People are going to ask ‘how did they do that’ and those are the sorts of conversations and questions that we want to create, which then opens up those audiences to the campaign message.”

Bluntly stating the realities of trying to convey their message to a footballer supporter, Duff states “if I come and stand in front of you as you’re walking to the football match with a big placard which says ‘Get Gazprom out of the Champions League and out of the Arctic,’ you’re going to look at me and think I’m crazy. You’d probably say things like ‘get a job’ and then that conversation between us isn’t going very well. But, if I’m able to do something like this, you’re going to respond ‘ah, that’s cool, how did they do that,’ and then at the same time the message of our campaign is kind of seeping in there was well. We’ve opened a door with you which otherwise probably would’ve remained closed.”

Duff claims Greenpeace exercised “total domination in the sphere of delivery, we just totally dominated our opponents, Gazprom. They had no way of stopping us and no idea what was happening.” Hearing Duff proudly boast about the success his organisation has achieved thus far is remarkably similar to what we’d expect to hear from an exuberant manager during a press conference after winning a derby match against a cross-town rival.