A Multimodal Benchmark for Framing of Oil & Gas Advertising and Potential Greenwashing Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multimodal benchmark dataset of video ads for analyzing framing and greenwashing in oil and gas advertising, enabling evaluation of vision-language models in understanding strategic communication.

Contribution

It provides a novel, expert-annotated dataset of video ads with framing labels across multiple countries, designed specifically for vision-language model evaluation in the context of environmental messaging.

Findings

GPT-4.1 detects environmental messages with 79% F1 score

Best model achieves 46% F1 in identifying green innovation framing

Highlights challenges like implicit framing and cultural context handling

Abstract

Companies spend large amounts of money on public relations campaigns to project a positive brand image. However, sometimes there is a mismatch between what they say and what they do. Oil & gas companies, for example, are accused of "greenwashing" with imagery of climate-friendly initiatives. Understanding the framing, and changes in framing, at scale can help better understand the goals and nature of public relations campaigns. To address this, we introduce a benchmark dataset of expert-annotated video ads obtained from Facebook and YouTube. The dataset provides annotations for 13 framing types for more than 50 companies or advocacy groups across 20 countries. Our dataset is especially designed for the evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs), distinguishing it from past text-only framing datasets. Baseline experiments show some promising results, while leaving room for improvement for future work: GPT-4.1 can detect environmental messages with 79% F1 score, while our best model only achieves 46% F1 score on identifying framing around green innovation. We also identify challenges that VLMs must address, such as implicit framing, handling videos of various lengths, or implicit cultural backgrounds. Our dataset contributes to research in multimodal analysis of strategic communication in the energy sector.