So L.A - The Chris Ayres Weblog

IT BEGINS with a caricature of Al Gore — grossly overweight and dressed like a Victorian industrialist — pointing an umbrella at an overhead screen of climate data. The former vice-president’s audience is made up of cartoon penguins, who — in spite of the increasingly balmy conditions in Antarctica – snore at his global-warming lecture and fantasise about going to see X-Men 3.

“What is Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, all about?” reads the video’s description on YouTube.com, where it was posted.

“Global Warming? The Environment? Or something much more BORING? See Al Gore’s Penguin Army learn how crazy this flick really is . . .”

The maker of the Gore-baiting spoof is credited as Toutsmith, a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills, California. The video appears to have been produced on a home computer, with a budget of pennies. But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Toutsmith is actually operating from Washington, on a computer registered to a PR company called DCI Group. The company’s clients happen to include the multinational oil company ExxonMobil.

The YouTube mystery comes as Mr Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary that combines classroom science with blatant self-promotion, continues to draw surprisingly large audiences. In spite of the film showing at only 587 cinemas across America, it has made more than $20 million (£10.5 million). “We, like everyone else on the planet, have seen (the YouTube video) but did not fund it, did not approve it, and did not know what its source was,” said a spokesman for Exxon.

As for DCI Group, the company has declined to comment on the spoof, saying only: “DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients’ behalf.”

Yet the video on YouTube – which allows people to post short video clips online and share them with friends — appears to be an example of what the PR industry calls “Astro Turfing”. The term was first used by the US Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a Democrat, when trying to describe fake grassroots campaigns to sway public opinion.

In politics, infamous Astro Turfing campaigns have included the PR firm for the Zairian ambassador placing letters and articles in the US press praising President Mobutu.

There are also many recent examples of Astro Turfing in corporate America.

YouTube was deluged with almost 500 comments from users yesterday, including “f*** Exxon”, and “this is almost as dumb as Bush”. A few stood up for the spoof, with one remarking, “Too funny!!! Its amazing how the warmest days ever recorded were in the 1930s (remember the Dust Bowl?)”.

Sponsored links to the Al Gore video that had been placed on Google were taken down yesterday. It is not clear who paid for them.

If the video was produced by DCI Group, it would not be the PR company’s first attempt to produce its own content. The company operates a news and opinion website called Tech Central Station, which is sponsored by companies including Exxon, General Motors and McDonald’s. The website takes a highly sceptical view of climate change, and is openly anti-Gore.

Mr Gore has also used the internet to spread his message, releasing a YouTube video made by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons. But the video was clearly attributed to Paramount Classics, which also released Gore’s film.

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