How media agencies are tackling greenwashing

Things are about to get a lot tougher for com­pa­nies that indulge in green­wash – and for the mar­ket­ing agen­cies that sup­port them in their deceit­ful ways.

Con­scious that the world’s gaze is turn­ing to the UK as the Unit­ed Nations pre­pares to start its COP26 cli­mate con­fer­ence in Glas­gow, the government’s com­pe­ti­tion watch­dog, the Com­pe­ti­tion and Mar­kets Author­i­ty, has pub­lished a Green Claims Code for busi­ness­es. This guid­ance is designed to address the authority’s own find­ings that 40% of green claims made by com­pa­nies online are mis­lead­ing.

The Adver­tis­ing Stan­dards Author­i­ty has also sig­nalled its inten­tion to clamp down on green­wash, as it assess­es the ad industry’s role in address­ing the cli­mate cri­sis. It is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in cut­ting through jar­gon, so that con­sumers can under­stand what adver­tis­ers actu­al­ly mean when they use terms such as ‘car­bon neu­tral’ and ‘net zero’.

This back­lash against green­wash means that mar­ket­ing agen­cies may have to make some tough deci­sions, as the pres­sure grows on them to refuse work that smacks of eco­log­i­cal sophistry.

Accord­ing to Soli­taire Townsend, co-founder of the Futer­ra agency, the mar­ket­ing indus­try has large­ly kept out of the fir­ing line regard­ing its own account­abil­i­ty for green­wash­ing. It has used the very skills that it’s known for to man­age the nar­ra­tive and bury its role as a cheer­leader for the fos­sil-fuel indus­try, for instance. 

She believes that some agen­cies are no longer using adver­tis­ing for its intend­ed use: to influ­ence and inform con­sumer choice. Instead, “they’re try­ing to influ­ence us as cit­i­zens. They are lob­by­ing through adver­tis­ing.”

Dun­can Meisel is cam­paign direc­tor of Clean Cre­atives, an alliance of mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als who “believe that fos­sil-fuel clients rep­re­sent a threat to our shared future”. Ear­li­er in his career, he felt the full force of the oil industry’s mar­ket­ing might when he was work­ing with NGOs on cam­paigns to spread aware­ness of the cli­mate cri­sis and its caus­es. 

“Every time we tried to do some­thing that was good, there would be real­ly well-fund­ed and well-run PR and adver­tis­ing cam­paigns advo­cat­ing for what was bad,” Meisel recalls.

But now Clean Cre­atives has hit back by pub­lish­ing The F‑List, a ros­ter of the 90 biggest mar­ket­ing agen­cies known to have clients in the fos­sil-fuel indus­try. 

This ini­tia­tive is about “bring­ing trans­paren­cy to an area that the adver­tis­ing indus­try tries to hide”, Meisel explains. “The agen­cies that work for fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies aren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of it. For most part, they don’t share this infor­ma­tion on their web­sites.”

Townsend agrees. “Our indus­try is ter­ri­ble at trans­paren­cy,” she says, adding that even the oil majors tend to be far more will­ing to talk about their activ­i­ties than the agen­cies they hire are to dis­cuss theirs.

In Novem­ber 2020, Clean Cre­atives asked agen­cies to sign a pledge declar­ing that they would decline any work offered by fos­sil-fuel com­pa­nies. More than 150 have since done so, many report­ing that they had turned down oppor­tu­ni­ties to pitch for new busi­ness. 

“The ques­tion for agen­cies is: which side are we on?” Meisel says.

There is more pres­sure too from the Change Some­thing, Change Every­thing cam­paign. Cre­at­ed by ATI, an alliance of Latin Amer­i­can mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies, with sup­port from like-mind­ed Euro­pean busi­ness­es, this is chal­leng­ing agen­cies to “stop sell­ing car­bon” and drop any accounts that pro­mote the use of fos­sil fuels. 

“The sto­ry has to change,” says ATI mem­ber Mar­i­an Ven­tu­ra, founder and CEO of the Done! agency in Buenos Aires. “As experts in con­nect­ing with the pub­lic, we have a major respon­si­bil­i­ty to act dif­fer­ent­ly.”

Townsend believes there are three key fac­tors that will, soon­er or lat­er: “squeeze all agen­cies that work with destruc­tive clients”. The first con­cerns a fun­da­men­tal gen­er­a­tional change: the best young peo­ple enter­ing the indus­try sim­ply don’t want to work on oil and gas briefs.

“Are the short-term rev­enue gains of work­ing with oil and gas worth the loss of a wealth of future mar­ket­ing tal­ent?” she says.

The sec­ond fac­tor con­cerns the views of exist­ing clients. Futer­ra is a pio­neer of client dis­clo­sure report­ing, in which mar­ket­ing agen­cies list their sources of income. So far, more than 300 agen­cies have bought into the idea, bring­ing much-need­ed trans­paren­cy to the indus­try, accord­ing to Townsend. But she adds that the biggest play­ers have not fol­lowed suit, because they wouldn’t want any of the pur­pose-led clients on their books to know that they also do busi­ness with the fos­sil-fuel sec­tor. 

Con­sumer-goods com­pa­nies that have posi­tioned them­selves as offer­ing sus­tain­able solu­tions would be “very uncom­fort­able with being in that kind of com­pa­ny”, Townsend says. 

She adds that many such firms have strict poli­cies to improve sus­tain­abil­i­ty in their sup­ply chains, yet they’re seek­ing “more trans­paren­cy from small­hold­ers in sub-Saha­ran Africa, say, than they’re ask­ing from their glob­al cre­ative agen­cies”. Townsend believes that this sit­u­a­tion is ripe for change. 

The third area is reg­u­la­tion. The local gov­ern­ment of Ams­ter­dam, for instance, has banned all bill­board and poster ads pro­mot­ing the use of fos­sil fuels in the city cen­tre and on the sub­way sys­tem. France is set to fol­low suit next year, while sim­i­lar moves are being dis­cussed in Nor­way and sev­er­al US states.

Meisel believes it will sim­ply become too dif­fi­cult for these com­pa­nies to adver­tise effec­tive­ly, with bans and lim­its on cre­ativ­i­ty – such as the need to dis­close envi­ron­men­tal data – mak­ing it hard­er for them to get their mes­sage across. 

Most of the pro­posed adver­tis­ing bans would affect firms that make more than a cer­tain per­cent­age of their income from oil and gas. This is impor­tant, Meisel says, because it should make agen­cies that claim to rep­re­sent the ‘green arm’ of an ener­gy com­pa­ny think twice.

“It’s not respon­si­ble to be pro­mot­ing an oil and gas major’s renew­able prod­ucts in a world where that com­pa­ny devotes 95% of its cap­i­tal expen­di­ture to new oil and gas,” he argues.

Even if agen­cies do decide to shun the fos­sil-fuel indus­try en masse, won’t the big play­ers sim­ply take the cre­ative work in house, giv­en that they have plen­ty of mon­ey to throw at the prob­lem and mar­ket­ing teams of their own?

Go ahead, says Townsend. “If they can’t work with the best agen­cies, with the best peo­ple and the best insights, doing it them­selves is very much sec­ond best.”

Meisel agrees. “I think that would sig­nif­i­cant­ly dimin­ish their abil­i­ty to reach the pub­lic,” he says. “Their work would become more par­ti­san, more mar­gin­alised and less effec­tive.”