Puerto Rico's Private Energy Company Released a Marketing Video It Calls a 'Documentary,' a Move Right out of the Fossil Fuel Propaganda Playbook

Luma Energy, the private energy company that controls Puerto Rico’s energy grid, released a marketing video called "A la luz de la verdad" (In the Light of Truth) on Sunday. Shot and edited to look like a genuine documentary, it purports to explain how the archipelago’s grid fell into disrepair through mismanagement, unions, and political corruption. However, the real truth is that it’s a long-form ad by a company trying to regain positive public opinion after people have turned against them and the government is contemplating cancelling their contract.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room. The point the ad is trying to get across by using archival footage, beautiful b-roll, and “interviews” with employees, economists, and the former head of the public electric utility is mostly true.[[1]] There was rampant corruption and mismanagement of Puerto Rico's electrical utility that led to the degraded grid that got wrecked by Hurricane María. But, unions aren't the devil come to Earth. And like Luma claims journalists have done to them, they only presented one side of the story and left out a bundle of facts that would inevitably paint them as continuing the mismanagement of the electrical grid.

For example, some viewers were treated to a 4D experience while they were getting ready to watch the video because about 300,000 people lost power before the ad aired on multiple news channels in the archipelago. In fact, the amount of blackouts have actually increased since 2022, a year after Luma took over. The company says that’s because they used better testing standards than the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which used to manage the grid. However, the difference between 2019 and 2024 is a shocking 13,500 more blackouts for the latter year, a difference that can't be easily explained away. Meanwhile, if you look at some of the major blackouts we’ve faced over the last four years, some of them can be partially attributed to overgrown vegetation touching an electrical line, like the Holy Week blackout in April, which is a problem they should be working to fix. And, let’s not forget the time a judge issued an arrest warrant for the company’s former president because he wouldn’t give legislators documents they requested. 

None of this is part of the video because it would go against its purpose: present a curated set of “facts” and a worldview that engenders compassion for them and lets them off the hook for worsening Puerto Rico's energy crisis.

Even though Luma is an energy company, this is a move straight out of Big Oil’s advertising playbook.

Since at least the 1980s, the fossil fuel industry has been using sleek and eye-catching ads disguised as newspaper editorials – called "advertorials" – to downplay their products' effects on climate change even though they knew about the connection as early as 1954. This tactic set the stage for many other mis/disinformation strategies, all of which are still in use today, such as how the end to burning fossil fuels could mean risking a country's economic future or that these companies will be "part of the solution" to climate change.

Mobil and ExxonMobil placed advertorials opposite the op-ed page of The New York Times every Thursday for nearly 30 years. Similar advertorials were placed in other major newspapers. Scholars called these advertorials “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America,” according to an article in The Guardian by climate researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes.

Over the years, these paper advertorials shifted into television spots, documentary-like marketing films, and social media ads. A bevy of influencers have gone on sponsored trips and posted sponsored content paid for by the likes of BP and ConocoPhillips. Meanwhile, a Shell TV ad emphasized clean energy and a green future even though 98.7% of the company’s investments between 2010 and 2018 were for oil and gas. If you want a more narrative example of how Big Oil gets their point across, look at Billy Bob Thornton talk about how windmills are for dumb liberals in Landman. 

When these companies started to come under fire about what they knew about climate change and when they knew it, they deflected and dug in their heels, saying they had never lied about the dangers burning fossil fuels and climate change.

“Exxon argues that anyone who takes a deep dive at all the evidence will come to the conclusion that there’s been no wrongdoing here,” Supran said in a video for a landmark study where he, alongside Oreskes, assessed ExxonMobil’s advertising campaign. They found the company “contributed… loudly to raising doubts” and published “several instances of explicit factual misrepresentation.”

Now, if you switch “Exxon” for “Luma” in Supran’s quote, you can perfectly understand what the company was trying to do with their television ad disguised as a documentary.

A lawyer who speaks in the video says that nowhere in Luma’s contract with the government it’s stated that blackouts won’t happen, laying the rhetorical groundwork against possible future litigation like those that have come for Big Oil.

Through their marketing, Luma was trying to muddy the waters, cast doubt, and bring up old history to shape a new narrative about that concealed they have simply not done a very good job at fixing the archipelago's energy grid even though they had marketed themselves as if they were ready to usher in a new electrified age in Puerto Rico.

“[Exxon] said journalists have deliberately cherry picked statements to come to the conclusions that they have,” Supran said in a video from the same aforementioned study. Similarly, Luma’s advertorial video begins by publicly calling into question the validity of the journalists that have reported on how Luma has contributed to the archipelago’s energy crisis[[2]], already priming people to question any future reporting about the company. 

Next, just like how Big Oil exclusively referenced economic models created by scientists they commissioned, the Luma brought in right-leaning libertarian economists to give an “expert” voice to the argument they were making throughout the video, which is that Luma must be the business that controls the grid and that it will eventually bring prosperity. However, much like how Big Oil’s models leave out the cost of inaction on climate change, the advertisement’s economists never talk about the continued monetary and human cost of leaving Luma in charge of the power grid.

There's a whole coterie of climate and environmental "experts" and media celebrities who are more than willing to lend their voice and support to dismissing climate change. A recent example I happened upon was a 4-part series of videos by Shell about an offshore oil rig featuring Kari Byron from Mythbusters as the host of each episode. Using her pre-established credibility and the fun, inviting style of a docuseries that you could catch on the History Channel while flipping through channels at midnight, the videos make the implicit argument that Shell has to drill for more oil because it powers everything about human society. While the argument it makes is less explicit than Luma's marketing video, it's company propaganda all the same that's laundered as factual because of its aesthetics. All of these types of promotional material functions the same way. They're trying to convince you of something but stating that directly is not a great argument. Instead, they try to get at you through tugging at your heartstrings, like an employee crying because he feels like he's been mistreated by the public for just doing his job or a kid finally being able to travel to see his grandmother because cars run on premium unleaded gasoline.

Many of the people “interviewed” in Luma's video talk about how they are Puerto Ricans as well, suffering through the same blackouts as everybody else. This fits into the “we’re all in this together” strategy propagated by fossil fuel companies. Luma's is a twofold argument. First, it plays on the age-old technique of deflecting blame by saying regular Puerto Ricans have as much input as the private companies that run our electrical grid and electrical generation, an obvious falsehood. Second, if all Puerto Ricans are part of the solution then it stands to reason that all Puerto Ricans were part of the problem as well, and allowed the grid to fall into disrepair through 40 years of mismanagement and corruption. This is the ultimate point the advertising video is trying to get across: it wasn't us, but it was everybody else.

It seems that Luma's outlook hasn't changed over the years.

In June 2021, a Luma representative explained away "the lack of progress by arguing that corruption and the Puerto Rican people's resistance to the elimination of corruption (which she argued was part of the change that LUMA offered) slowed down progress." The interview was part of a study on how discourses of delay are used throughout the archipelago by researchers from Northeastern University that was released in 2024.

By framing corruption as endemic to the Puerto Rican way of life, as something whose elimination they actively resist, Luma is able to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing even though it is far closer to the levers of power than any one person could ever be.

I want to make a special note here of how Luma's video attacks unions by saying they don’t respond to the needs of the people, but that Luma does – as if they’re not a private company who solely answers to the shareholders of their parent company. Truth be told, they go after unions and their strikes so much because they know collective power is one of the few things that can actually bend public government or private businesses to the will of the people instead of the will of the stockholder who only care about return on investment, not the societal value of a functioning electrical grid.

Then — and this is probably what caused the most anger in people — they all but outright said anybody who thought the energy crisis would be fixed in a short period of time is a fool. They say the grid should be “stabilized” by 2031, a period so far in the future that there’s no telling whether another category 4 hurricane will wreck the power grid, allowing them to move the goalposts even further into the future or blame something else for the energy crisis. Again, this rhymes with the discourses of delay used by fossil fuel companies. By saying that a green transition or a good electrical grid can happen, but that it cannot be done quickly, they’re setting the base for continuing their control and earnings.

There’s an unspoken but implied threat throughout the advertisement: if it’s not Luma, then who else is in line to manage the grid? Nobody, according to them. When they can't convince you that they just need more time or that you were defrauded by the government, they resort to this. I don't doubt there aren't many private disaster capitalism companies lining up to do the very real work that's needed to fix Puerto Rico's grid. However, that seems to be the only genuine argument they're making throughout the whole video. Fossil fuel companies operate with a similar message. Since oil if life, taking away their ability to drill for it and then sell it is a mortal threat to them and everybody else.

The last commonality between fossil fuel advertorials and Luma’s advertorial video that I want to highlight is how they use their placement within mainstream media to engender trust with the audience. The reason Exxon’s advertorials in NYT were so successful is because readers have a very hard time distinguishing between journalism and marketing, sometimes because media companies make it that way on purpose.

"Because these ads appear on reputable, trusted news platforms, and are formatted like reported pieces, they often come across to readers as genuine journalism," said Michelle Amazeen, director of the Communications Research Center at Boston University, in a press release for a study about solutions to sneaky oil advertising.

Luma tried to trade on the trust of news organizations and television channels by placing ads in the newspaper for the video that bore the logos of multiple television logos. For example, the ad for the video in El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s largest newspaper, has the logo of three big television channels on the archipelago, such as Telemundo and TeleOnce. They also seemingly paid for it to run on multiple television channels at a prime time on the Sunday when it aired, which could cause confusion as to whether it was a real documentary or an ad.

When you search for "A la luz de la verdad" on YouTube, the first entry that comes up is on El Nuevo Día’s[[3]] channel with a thumbnail that features the logo of the newspaper and a separate daily owned by the same company alongside Luma’s logo. At least their post has a disclaimer that says it's an ad. On the other hand, NotiUno's (a major radio station) YouTube channel doesn't have a disclaimer and their thumbnail reads "first with the news," further pushing the idea this is a real documentary not just paid marketing.

Everything from the way "A la luz de la verdad" was made to seem like a docuseries through certain editing techniques to the way "interviewees" were framed was meant to make the advertorial appear as if it was “genuine journalism,” like Amazeen describes.

Thankfully, people have seemingly not fallen for this marketing tactic in the same way as they did with fossil fuel advertorials. Instead, both the media and regular people have reacted incredibly negatively to the video. Politicians have started asking if they used public money to pay for it since Luma has already spent $4.4 million this year on public relations, according to one state legislator.

In response, Luma has said the video was paid for by their parent companies, Atco and Quanta. Although I’m not an economist, I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works. Luma’s parent companies get paid based on the company’s contract with the government of Puerto Rico. That money gets deposited into their respective bank accounts, from which they then allegedly shelled out to make the video and to place it on all the channels where it aired. In the end, it's all coming from a marketing budget that Luma's profits were part of feeding.

When it comes to the media’s response to Luma’s advertorial, I was pleasantly surprised to see people immediately call this out for what it was: an ad. However, they still continued to frame it as a “documentary” and not propaganda. This rhetorical allowance cedes ground for Luma to stand on when discussing the one-sided facts they presented in the video during the media tour the company has been on since the video's release. 

A clear distinction between journalism and marketing has to be created because oil companies are already very good at manipulating journalists, and we can't fall prey to that as well with local energy companies. Don't even get me started on media companies making marketing materials for fossil fuel companies and how that degrades the industry as a whole. (It's unclear who made the ad that was placed in newspapers or who made the video. The video specifies it was made by "Puerto Rican talent.")

However, this advertorial video was not primarily aimed at the media — who are ostensibly supposed to always be critical about this type of stuff. Instead, it was meant for people who are not attuned to the discourse surrounding Luma and the energy crisis in Puerto Rico. That’s where the perceived authenticity that comes from being on several television networks and on YouTube with news organization logos really comes into play.

If someone is already primed to believe this type of propaganda or is somehow out of the loop, then those logos at the bottom of the screen that you barely notice while the thing aired are marks of authenticity, of “genuine journalism.” Luma is betting that their video will be able to sow doubt within these people, allowing for their narrative to take hold, regardless of what they hear somewhere else. 

This is based on the same strategy as the one that powered fossil fuel advertorials. As the 1998 “Victory” memo – which I cite once a month at this point – laid out, “victory will be achieved when… average citizens” and the “media ‘understands’ (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science.” They wanted to make sure that “media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current ‘conventional wisdom.’” 

Questioning the “conventional wisdom” was an essential part of their strategy for both media and regular people. Since everybody is pretty much agreed on the “conventional wisdom” being that Luma has not managed the grid well and that they need to leave, they decided to make a news-like product to question it themselves. 

Yet, the difference between the fossil fuel industry’s effects on climate change and Luma’s effects on Puerto Rico’s power grid is that you can’t “feel” the climate crisis as acutely and immediately as people feel the blackouts affecting Puerto Rico. Because this is an everyday thing for many Puerto Ricans, people have already been innoculated to this sort of propaganda and reacted extremely negatively, publicly calling them out for rehashing old history five years after they started looking at our grid to excuse themselves for poor maintenance and mismanagement. 

In fact, one of the core arguments of the video — that Puerto Ricans are resistant to the change Luma wants to bring — was preempted by the same aforementioned Luma employee of who was interviewed in 2021 for the 2024 Northeastern study on discourses of delay.

Here’s what the employee said:

Right now I think it's an issue of general resistance to change. The way that both the government and the consumer had been accustomed to receiving electric service is very different from the LUMA proposal. So we're seeing resistance from many, including the classic example, no, from the legislature. Public legislators who were used to accessing the information they needed to keep their constituents informed in an informal way.... Now there are rigorous processes and there are established channels of contact … once this format is stabilized and once the public gets used to it and learns to relate in this new way with the company that provides the electric service, I think everyone will be better off.

Now, it’s Luma who’s resistant to the change that might be cutting off their money hose. And if there's one thing that private companies understand above anything else, it's that the return on investment must increase. Because a significant lack of government oversight and regulation, they were allowed to do the bare minimum or worse for a long time, which might end up costing them their contract.

While it’s not clear if Luma’s contract will actually get cancelled this year or if it’s just political kayfabe, it’s clear the company is feeling the heat. Much like fossil fuel companies fighting against a just transition, Luma is relying on shuffling bundles of cash towards marketing and the strength of the status quo to keep them in place.

Instead of people getting accustomed to what Luma has done to the grid, Luma has refashioned itself to the political landscape of Puerto Rico and adopted the same "informal" way of communication as the politicians they blame for the grid's mess. Like an embattled politician suffering from one scandal after another who's trying to keep their seat, they released a thinly veiled attack ad but it's five years too late and using dirty tactics that many people already know how to recognize and counteract.

Much like how the fossil fuel industry used their marketing disguised as editorial to deflect and deny, Luma used their promotional video disguised as documentary to shift the blame elsewhere and imply that we have no other choice but to stick it out with their shitty service.

They invested all that time, money, and effort into attempting to conjure up a new narrative, but it wasn't strong enough to displace the lived experience of the Puerto Ricans who have to live with Luma's mismanagement every single day. People on the archipelago know the reality of the situation and they shouldn't let anybody pull the wool over their eyes.

[[1]]: To be clear, while this essay is long, it's not meant to be a massive point-by-point debunking of Luma's video. Many better journalists than me have done much better work on that beat that I ever could. Assuredly, the government bears even more responsibility for the energy crisis than anybody else, but this article isn't about them.

[[2]]: Anecdotally, I have lost electricity at least twice since Monday night when I started writing this and Wednesday night when I finished editing. And I'm one of the lucky ones because my family has solar panels, batteries, and a generator.

[[3]]: Credit where credit's due. Many newspapers are extremely bad at separating their opinion pages from the journalism section to the point that many people don't know one from the other. However, El Nuevo Día brings in a whole new design language for the opinions section. Whether they should be publishing a lot of those opinions in the first place is another issue altogether.