#ad agencies

[rjzimmerman]

Ad Giant WPP Has Broken International Guidelines on Climate and Human Rights, Charge Campaigners

Groups file OECD complaint against the world’s largest advertising and PR firm, say its work enables major polluters to harm environmental a

Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:

Climate campaigners have filed a complaint against WPP, the London-based advertising giant, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), stating that it has violated key corporate guidelines on climate and human rights.

Adfree Cities and the New Weather Institute filed the complaint today with the UK branch of the OECD.

They charge that WPP’s work for major fossil fuel polluters like BP, Saudi Aramco and Shell, along with its work for other heavily polluting industries such as carmakers, airlines, and plastics, makes the company accountable for enabling pollution as well as human rights violations. According to DeSmog’s research, WPP — the world’s largest advertising agency by revenue — also works with TotalEnergies, as well as a number of other oil and gas clients.

“The complaint significantly raises the legal risks for advertising firms,” said Harj Narulla, a barrister representing the climate campaign groups and co-author of the complaint. “By continuing to work for polluting clients, WPP is failing to meet its own environmental commitments and contributing to harm on a global scale.”

The groups filed the complaint at the OECD’s “National Contact Point” in the UK, where WPP is headquartered. The campaigners say this is the first time the OECD has received a complaint against an advertising company. 

“While claiming to take the climate crisis seriously, WPP has become the chief propagandist for some of the most polluting corporations on the planet — many of whom are shredding their own, already limited green pledges,” Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, told DeSmog. “This complaint is designed to compel WPP and its subsidiaries to comply with international rules it has signed up to, and the promises and claims it has made.”

Simms and his co-complainants say that WPP must disclose the emissions generated by its work for high-polluting clients, also known as “advertised emissions”; conduct due diligence to prevent damage to the environment and human rights as a result of its business operations; and drop clients not aligned with climate goals. 

“All this would just bring WPP into line with what it already claims to live up to,” said Simms.

As of 2024, WPP had more fossil fuel industry contracts — at least 79 — than its major ad industry rivals, according to research by campaign group Clean Creatives.

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[adtothebone]

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[copyranter]

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[rjzimmerman]

More than 450 scientists call on PR and ad firms to cut their ties with fossil fuel clients

The question for the PR and ad business is whether a coalition of academics and advocates can get them to cut their ties with fossil fuel companies.

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

The public relations giant Edelman vaulted to the top of its profession with clever campaigns that burnished the images of leading corporations. Now, under fire for its work on behalf of fossil fuel companies, Edelman is scrambling to bolster its own reputation.

On Wednesday, more than 450 scientists called on public relations and advertising firms, including the prestigious Edelman, to stop working for oil and gas companies. The firms’ ad campaigns for these companies, the scientists said, “represent one of the biggest barriers to the government action science shows is necessary to mitigate the ongoing climate emergency.” A group of 100 activists and former Edelman employees partnered with Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and ad agencies to quit fossil fuels, to issue the same demand.

The question for the PR and ad business is whether this emboldened coalition of academics and advocates can turn fossil fuel companies into social pariahs — a sort of New Tobacco.

Major financial institutions are trying to walk a similarly fine line. Last year, the asset and risk management firm BlackRock threw its considerable weight behind the election of three dissident directors at ExxonMobil, which on Tuesday said its own operations would reach net zero by 2050. In December, however, BlackRock was part of a multibillion-dollar deal to buy pipelines from Saudi Aramco. On Tuesday, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said his firm, which has $10 trillion under management, would not become the “climate police” or divest itself of fossil fuel firms.

“I do believe that extractive industry is going the way of tobacco, and for that same reason any [ad] agency who either claims ‘purpose’ or dabbles in sustainability will have to stop working with them,” said Henk Campher, who joined Edelman in 2009 to advise companies on developing corporate responsibility strategies and left in 2015 over what he said was Edelman’s lucrative work for the American Petroleum Institute. “Like CVS did — you can’t sell tobacco and medicine at the same time,” he said.

[rjzimmerman]

Ad Agencies Step Away From Oil and Gas in Echo of Cigarette Exodus

A queasiness has set in among some people who have made ads promoting fossil fuels. One executive likened the shift to the ad industry’s move away from tobacco.

Excerpt form this story from the New York Times:

It’s night. A little boy opens the door to his father’s room. “Dad, I’m scared,” he says. The father carries the boy back to his bed, tucks him in and clicks on a night light. “It’s only human to care for those we love,” says an offscreen voice, “and also help light their way.”

This is the start of a recent commercial for Chevron, which goes on to say that the company is bringing “affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy to America.” It is the kind of feel-good ad that has long drawn criticism from environmentalists, who argue that such messaging, which they call greenwashing, may mislead viewers about the extent of their climate change commitments. Weeks after the commercial was posted on YouTube, where it has racked up more than 200,000 views, a Chevron refinery in California leaked some 600 gallons of “petroleum and water mixture” into the San Francisco Bay.

Because of this ad and others like it, Greenpeace USA and other environmental groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on March 16 that accused Chevron of “consistently misrepresenting its image to appear climate-friendly and racial justice-oriented, while its business operations overwhelmingly rely on climate-polluting fossil fuels, which disproportionately harm communities of color.”

The F.T.C. complaint is part of a larger movement that lately has been gaining support from some key players in the promotion of the oil and gas companies: the people who create their ads and shape their public relations messages.

Guy Hayward, the global chief executive of Forsman & Bodenfors, an international ad agency with major offices in Sweden and New York, said in an interview that the company’s New York office signed a pledge this month to no longer work for oil and gas producers, as well as utility companies and their lobbyists.

Dozens of other ad agencies, most of them small, have signed the same pledge, which was put together by the advocacy group Fossil Free Media. The effort, which is known as Clean Creatives, is managed by Duncan Meisel, an environmental activist who conceded that it would be difficult for ad agencies to say no to fossil fuel dollars during a pandemic.