Climate groups tried to spur action with a Taylor Swift ticket giveaway. Can it work?

TORONTO — Taylor Swift commands a legion of devotees, but among the thousands decked out in cowboy boots, friendship bracelets and glitter at her Canadian performances, one was not like the others.

Millions of people attended the Eras Tour. Avery Parisien might be the only 15-year-old who got there by protesting a major bank and its investments in fossil fuels.

“I had no idea that, like, banks even supported things like that,” the Ontario teen said. “It was just insane to learn about.”

Parisien’s education in RBC’s investments trace back to an unusual ticket giveaway contest that sought to leverage the power of Swifties, the portmanteau for the superstar’s fan base.

While Eras Tour tickets have been used as a magnet for companies and even charities to attract new customers and donors, a campaign called Unite the Swifties took it a step further.

The campaign encouraged people who wanted free tickets to engage in escalating actions against RBC, one of the world’s largest bank financiers of fossil-fuel companies — and the “Official Ticket Access Partner” for Swift’s tour stops in Toronto and Vancouver.

Borrowing from Swift’s lyrics and esthetic, the campaign organized by three Canadian advocacy groups urged fans to ask the superstar to drop RBC as a partner.

To enter the ticket sweepstakes, contestants only needed to sign up with their contact information. But from there, they could earn more entries with each escalating action they took, from signing a petition to organizing a protest.

Parisien was one of three contestants to win a pair of tickets. She brought her mom, Kara Parisien, who joined Avery in each campaign action.

“It’s something that will stick with me for the rest of my life,” the teenager said. “It was such a cool journey to be able to go through.”

The campaign organized by Decolonial Solidarity, Change Course and Stand.Earth has drawn a mix of intrigue, skepticism and praise from organizers and academics who study Canadian social movements. Observers says it offers an example of how advocacy groups are testing out novel tactics to bring in new recruits in the fight against global warming.

“I definitely have not seen anything like that,” said Emily Huddart, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who studies civic engagement in environmentalism.

The campaign gets at deeper questions about political activism, said Huddart. Can incentivized activism outlive the incentive? And is it really a good idea for campaigns to try motivating action with gamified sweepstakes?

While she appreciated the campaign’s ingenuity, Huddart said it gave her pause to see market-based tactics applied to political activism.

But people often get politically active for reasons more nuanced than strict altruism or self-interest, she said, adding youth engagement in protest was, by some measures, at historically low levels.

And activists have to compete for people’s attention on hyper-individualized social-media feeds imbued with advertisements, she said.

“I can’t really believe myself when I saw this, but maybe there is something worthwhile in using this sort of enticement,” she said.

“In the context of how difficult it is to, you know, remain focused on something in an era of distraction — how difficult it is to do something that’s not related to earning money or relaxing — just people making an effort is something to celebrate.”

It’s not the first example of Swifties demonstrating political force.

Fans helped catapult antitrust lawsuits and investigations targeting Ticketmaster after Eras Tour ticket sales were marred by issues. Organizers of the campaign that rewarded Parisien decided to try and leverage that same fan power in opposition to RBC’s fossil-fuel financing.

From 2016 to 2023, RBC committed $256 billion to fossil fuel businesses, a report in May found, putting it in the top 10 banks worldwide and ahead of any other Canadian bank.

In particular, organizers of the Unite the Swifties campaign underlined RBC’s investments in TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink project, a 670-kilometre natural gas pipeline in British Columbia that runs through Wet’suwet’en Nation territory. They said they aimed to highlight connections between climate change, financing and Indigenous rights.

Opposition among hereditary chiefs prompted protest and rail blockades in 2020, though the elected council of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation had agreed to the project. It was mechanically completed in November of last year.

In response to the Unite the Swifties campaign’s tactics and claims, an RBC spokesperson said the bank believes it can help its clients “succeed in the long-term, including through the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

“It’s really unfortunate that a very small group of activists are attempting to co-opt one of the most exciting events of 2024 in an attempt to advance their own agenda and disrupt the experience for thousands of fans,” spokesperson Andrew Block said in a written statement.

Campaign organizers counter with a similar charge: that RBC’s partnership with Swift’s tour is a way to use music sponsorships to inoculate their image against criticism of their business practices. It’s a phenomenon they deride as “art washing.”

Bella Lyne, one of the organizers who helped devise the campaign, said many fans might have initially been drawn in by the promise of Swift tickets.

But as contestants learned more about how climate change is affected by large-scale investments in fossil fuels, some chose to stay involved “because of their desire to be a powerful force for change,” Lyne said.

“I think we recognized the compatibility between … the message Taylor Swift puts out there around young people being empowered and I think young women, in particular, speaking up and speaking their mind,” said Lyne, a national co-ordinator with Decolonial Solidarity.

That was the case for Avery Parisien.

During her 15 years on the planet, she has come to feel strongly about protecting it, she said. She started an “eco club” at school in Grade 7, and is prone to falling down what she describes as YouTube “rabbit holes” about climate change.

But when it came to getting involved, it was hard to know where or how to make an impact, especially in her small city east of Ottawa, she said. “I’ve never had anything that’s like, brought me in.”

The Unite the Swifties campaign predominantly used Instagram and TikTok to spread the word. It suggested entrants engage in campaign actions both online and off, with offline actions in their communities giving them the best shot to win tickets.

After registering for the contest, earning her one entry, Parisien signed an online petition to demand RBC defund from fossil fuels — getting a second — and she sent an email to the bank’s CEO to secure five more.

After that, she joined five training modules, worth 50 entries each, about topics such as the role of art in social movements and Indigenous resistance to RBC-backed pipelines.

But she really improved her odds when she handed out flyers in the community with her mom, for 500 entries, and made a PowerPoint presentation about RBC’s investments and shared it with a friend for another 1,000.

In all, organizers say nearly 9,000 people entered the contest and generated more than 100,000 entries by taking additional actions to put pressure on RBC. A survey of entrants found that a little over half of respondents said they had never participated in a climate action.

Lyne said organizers are still sorting through the campaign results to gauge its success, but there were some promising signs. The campaign says 166 people took part in at least one of the training modules and 32 of those people moved on to taking action in their community.

Aliénor Rougeot, a key Canadian organizer of the Greta Thunberg-inspired 2019 youth climate strikes, said the campaign offers a lesson about how to make activism more relatable, accessible and even joyful by tapping into pop culture.

She suggested the approach can be complementary to other acts of protest, such as marches.

“It really speaks to a different audience, a new one, maybe an audience that doesn’t see themselves in traditional environmentalism or traditional political action,” said Rougeot, 25, who now works at Canadian advocacy group Environmental Defence.

Parisien was part of that new audience. She said it inspired confidence and helped dispel some of her insecurities about being taken seriously as a young woman.

“No matter, like, who you are, you have a voice,” she said. “And, like, you should use it. And you can use it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 13, 2024.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press