A major advertising campaign that claimed coal was “amazing” and had “endless possibilities” appears to have proved counter-productive, a new poll suggests.

The net approval rating of coal fell by 9% after Australia’s mining industry ran the “Little Black Rock” campaign, which began in September across TV, radio, press and online, and featured a close-up of a lump of glistening coal.

The ad claimed coal added $40bn a year to Australia’s economy and “can now reduce its emissions by up to 40%”. The tagline was: “Isn’t it amazing what this little black rock can do?”

Before the ads were aired the net approval for coal was -18% but after they aired it had dropped to -27%, a net change of -9%.



The mining industry’s advertisement for coal.

The council’s #coalisamazing hashtag was mocked until it trended on Twitter and it was slammed as a public relations failure.

The research was commissioned by fossil fuel free superannuation fund Future Super, whose managing director Simon Sheikh claims the glossy Minerals Council of Australia campaign backfired.

“The coal industry has been running this aggressive advertising campaign but they’ve been doing so in the face of an ongoing sea of information, public releases and news stories about the decline of the industry,” Sheikh told Guardian Australia.

“They’re trying to tell a positive story about coal when the numbers tell a very different story. And what it shows is that people see through it when they read the newspaper, when they talk to friends and family; they understand the story that the industry is not going to be part of Australia’s future.”



Conducted by Lonergan Research, the poll is part of a quarterly tracking poll series in which respondents are asked to offer their views on different energy sources including, coal seam gas and oil and natural gas.



Chris Lonergan of the company confirmed the poll’s finding were statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval. “The drop in community sentiment towards coal is quite dramatic for a three month period,” Lonergan said.

The ‘coal is amazing’ ad reworked as not so ‘good for humanity’ video

“Whilst the poll didn’t explore the reasons for the drop, this did coincide with the Mineral Council of Australia’s ‘little black rock’ campaign. The drop in sentiment may well be because the campaign backfired, or because the spoof responses from various advocacy organisations were more effective than the campaign itself.”



Sheikh said the poll wasn’t designed to test reactions to the coal is amazing campaign but it was “lucky that our timelines and their timelines matched up in such a way so that we could track their advertising”.



“We put out a spoof video with over 40,000 views in the first 48 hours,” he said. “We took the message to the streets of Canberra and filmed the reaction. When you’re a major company trying to convince people not to believe what they already believe it’s very difficult. So we can understand why they got such a comic reaction on social media.”



Sheikh said it was the biggest campaign from the industry since the campaign against Kevin Rudd’s mining tax. “We haven’t see too much from them, they retreated, but then as a reaction to the divestment in fossil fuels they came back and tried to tell their story.



“If you’re trying to sell a bad product you may as well give up and coal is a bad product.”

Sheikh called on the advertising industry to abandon the coal sector as a client.



The executive of Coal for the Minerals Council of Australia, Greg Evans, said he wanted to thank Future Super for “drawing attention to the successful Little Black Rock campaign”.

“Future Super should concentrate on maximising returns for their members rather than pursuing their tired anti-coal activist agenda,” Evans told Guardian Australia.

“The future demand for coal remains strong. In the past decade coal use grew four times faster than renewables and 50% faster than gas. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast that the world will use 1b tonnes more coal in 2019 than today.

“Global financing for coal mining rose to US$66bn in 2014, up from US$55bn in 2013 and a 360% increase from 2005.”

Lonergan Research carried out interviews among 1,002 Australians aged 18 or older