Taylor Swift has a legion of devotees, but among the thousands of people sporting cowboy boots, friendship bracelets and sequins during her Canadian performances, one was not like the others.

Millions of people attended the Eras Tour. Avery Parisien is perhaps the only 15-year-old to have achieved this by protesting against a major bank and its investments in fossil fuels.

“I didn’t even know banks backed things like that,” the Ontario teen said. “It was just crazy to learn more.”

The Parisian’s education in RBC investments dates back to an unusual ticket competition that sought to leverage the power of the Swifties, the portmanteau for the superstar’s fans.

While Eras Tour tickets have been used as a magnet for businesses and even charities to attract new customers and donors, a campaign called Unite the Swifties has gone even further.

The campaign encouraged people who wanted free tickets to engage in escalating action against RBC, one of the world’s largest banks financing fossil fuel companies – and the “official ticket access partner” for Swift’s tour stops in Toronto and Vancouver.

Taking inspiration from Swift’s lyrics and aesthetic, the campaign organized by three Canadian advocacy groups urged fans to ask the superstar to drop RBC as her partner.

To enter the ticket competition, participants simply had to register with their contact details. But from there, they could gain more participation with each growing action they took, from signing a petition to organizing a protest.

The Parisian was one of three candidates to win a pair of tickets. She was accompanied by her mother, Kara Parisien, who joined Avery in every campaign action.

“It’s something that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” the teen said. “It was a really cool trip to experience.”

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

“I certainly haven’t seen anything like this,” said Emily Huddart, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia who studies civic engagement in environmentalism.

The campaign addresses deeper questions about political activism, Huddart said. Can incentive activism survive incitement? And is it really a good idea for campaigns to try to motivate action with gamified sweepstakes?

Although she appreciated the ingenuity of the campaign, Huddart said it inspired her to see market-based tactics applied to political activism.

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

And activists must compete for people’s attention on hyper-individualized social media feeds infused with ads, she said.

“I couldn’t really believe myself when I saw that, but maybe there’s something interesting about using that kind of incentive,” she said.

“In the context of how difficult it is, you know, to stay focused on something in an age of distraction – how difficult it is to do something that has nothing to do with making money or to relax – just the fact that people are making an effort is something to celebrate.”

This isn’t the first example of Swifties flexing political muscle.

Fans helped catapult antitrust lawsuits and investigations targeting Ticketmaster after ticket sales for the Eras Tour were marred by problems. The organizers of the campaign that awarded the Parisian decided to try to harness that same fan power to oppose RBC’s fossil fuel funding.

From 2016 to 2023, RBC committed $256 billion to fossil fuel companies, according to a report released in May, placing it among the top 10 global banks and ahead of any other Canadian bank.

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

Opposition among hereditary chiefs led to protests and rail blockades in 2020, although the elected council of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation accepted the project. It was mechanically completed in November last year.

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

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

Campaign organizers counter with a similar accusation: RBC’s partnership with Swift’s tour is a way of using music sponsorships to protect their image from criticism of their business practices. It’s a phenomenon they call “art washing.”

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

But as candidates 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 that Taylor Swift is putting out around youth empowerment and I think young women, in particular, are speaking out and expressing their opinions,” Lyne said, national coordinator of Decolonial. Solidarity.

This was the case for Avery Parisien.

During her 15 years on the planet, she developed a deep conviction about its protection, 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 difficult to know where and how to make an impact, especially in her small town east of Ottawa, she said. “I’ve never had anything like this bring me.”

The Unite the Swifties campaign primarily used Instagram and TikTok to get the message out. It suggested participants engage in online and offline campaigning, with offline actions in their communities giving them the best chance of winning tickets.

After entering the competition, which earned her an entry, the Parisian signed an online petition to demand the removal of RBC’s funding from fossil fuels – getting a second – and she emailed the CEO of the bank to get five more.

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

But she really improved her chances when she distributed flyers in the community with her mother, for 500 entries, and she made a PowerPoint presentation on RBC investments and shared it with a friend for 1,000 others.

In total, organizers say nearly 9,000 people entered the contest and generated more than 100,000 entries as they took additional steps to put pressure on RBC. A survey of participants found that just over half of respondents said they had never participated in climate action.

Lyne said organizers were still sorting through the results of the campaign to gauge its success, but there were promising signs. The campaign indicates that 166 people participated in at least one of the training modules and that 32 of them took action in their community.

Aliénor Rougeot, one of the lead Canadian organizers of the Greta Thunberg-inspired youth climate strikes in 2019, said the campaign offers a lesson in how to make activism more approachable, more approachable and even more joyful by exploiting pop culture.

She suggested that this approach could be complementary to other acts of protest, such as marches.

“It’s really aimed at a different audience, a new audience, maybe an audience that doesn’t see themselves in traditional environmentalism or traditional political action,” said Rougeot, 25, who now works within from the Canadian advocacy group Environmental Defense.

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

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