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Marketing Brew

Jasmine Sheena

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Delta faces class-action lawsuit over carbon neutrality claims

The suit alleges that Delta’s carbon neutrality claims are “false and misleading” due to the “foundational issues with the voluntary carbon offset market.” 

Ryan Barwick

an old-timey scale -- on one side is a factory with emissions coming out of it, on the other side is a tree

Vox Media “formalizes” ban on fossil-fuel ads

The company also announced a carbon-neutral ad offering. 

Katie Hicks

imagery from "regenerative marketing" campaign from Tazos

Tazo’s latest campaign focused on regenerative practices could signal the next marketing sustainability trend.

What is ‘regenerative marketing’?

A retail shopping label with a recycle logo on it in front of leaves and other shopping labels on a light pink background

Sustainability

All was quiet on the climate front this year at Cannes. Or was it?

 storming beaches and jumping on stages, this year’s festival may have appeared relatively calm. However, groups like Clean Creatives were on the ground, reminding people—and specifically 

—about the harms of working with fossil-fuel companies.

, an initiative he started in 2020 to sever ties between agencies and fossil-fuel companies. According to the organization, since its inception, 600 agencies have pledged to stop working with fossil-fuel clients, including Forsman & Bodenfors, Hunter, and Moxie Media.

We spoke with Meisel at Cannes about the group’s strategies—including the first Next Level Climate Summit, which it co-hosted at this year’s festival—and whether the movement to get agencies to stop working with fossil-fuel companies is gaining traction.

At a festival where companies are spending 

, it can presumably be hard for an advocacy group to compete for both space and time.

“It’s always expensive and difficult,” Meisel told us. Still, he said it was worth it to be present to speak with brand and agency leaders, hear feedback, and show people how to get involved in the Clean Creatives movement.

Partnering with the Embassy of Dutch Creativity, he said, meant that the group could  host the Next Level Climate Summit on the Croisette, across from the likes of Freewheel and Google. While the venue “wasn’t a giant room,” he said, “we filled the room.”

Conversations ranged from shifting economies of scale in ad buying to greenwashing. The group also announced that Gale had committed to no longer working with fossil-fuel companies, becoming the largest agency to take the pledge.

Outside of the summit, Clean Creatives also made itself known at Cannes via pop-ups, 

, and stunts: It followed Richard Edelman, CEO of global PR firm Edelman, and other execs from the company with signs saying, “This person works with fossil fuel clients” and “This agency is happy to greenwash fossil fuels.” Another Clean Creative rep 

 Edelman for its work with fossil-fuel brands during a panel that included Amanda Edelman, who runs the firm's Gen Z lab.

“We brought a team of people who are 30 and under, or early in their careers, or focused on climate communication,” Meisel said. “Their voices aren’t prioritized in the places where decisions are made. We think they have a role to play, and we wanted to make sure they were heard.”

 Edelman because it does “more work with fossil-fuel leaders than any agency,” including companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, and has “increased their work with companies doing a lot of damage.” Meisel added that Edelman has “clearly changed some policy, but we don’t know how substantive that is.”

Edelman declined to answer a question about whether it has increased work with fossil-fuel companies in recent years.

 on LinkedIn that the Richard Edelman stunt generated “tricky conversations,” but went on to say that agencies should not be ashamed of their client relationships. “Either you are proud of your work with fossil-fuel polluters and should welcome this visibility, or you should leave them,” he wrote.

Shortly after the stunt, he told us, “We’re always as polite as we can be. We always try to be factually driven. But sometimes you need to be a little interrupt-y.”

Michael Bush, SVP of global marketing and communications at Edelman, told us via email that the company “strongly disagree[s]” with characterizations of its work that “question our commitments to addressing climate change,” adding that it “only works with businesses that are aligned with the Paris Agreement and have published net-zero plans.” (Meisel called this “demonstrably, obviously untrue” in his LinkedIn post, noting that Shell, which has a net-zero pledge in place, recently said it would 

“We have parted ways with several clients and regularly decline new business opportunities because of this principled approach,” Bush said.

Just as some companies have recently backpedaled on things 

 in light of conservative boycotts and backlash, we asked Meisel if he’s concerned that something similar could happen with environmental commitments.

“I am,” he said. “We can actively see it in the companies that we focus on in the fossil-fuel industry,” citing both BP and Shell, which 

 from some of their climate commitments this year. On the agency front, however, he said he’s more optimistic and has not seen the same degree of walking things back.

Even if the conversations around climate felt a bit quieter at Cannes this year, Meisel said he noticed more main-stage presentations and “fringe events” focused on the issue. “I think people responded to [last year’s] disruption productively,” he said. “Is there more to do? Yes, there’s always more to do…But it seems like things are moving in the right direction.”

As for his goals for Cannes next year? “I hope, and in some ways predict, that by this time next year, there will be at least one holding company, if not more, committed not to work with fossil-fuel companies,” he said. “I think we are approaching the moment where this is going to be the norm, and if not the norm, then a real badge of leadership.”

If that happens, he said, “We can come back next year and do a little less disruption.”

How Clean Creatives made itself known at Cannes this year

From following Richard Edelman to hosting an all-day summit, the group kept the climate conversation going. 

Carbon-neutral: It’s a term that seems to be popping up more and more in corporate marketing efforts as companies face pressure to address their roles in the climate crisis. (Just look at your 

, most Americans don’t even know what “carbon-neutral” means. When asked to select the definition, only 41% of respondents chose the right one: “A company that produces carbon emissions but uses carbon-offset programs to remove as much carbon as they produce from the atmosphere.”

Even the majority of respondents who said they’ve changed their behavior due to climate-crisis concerns either didn’t know or selected the wrong definition.

With many terms floating around—from carbon-neutral to net zero to carbon-negative—and a carbon-offset industry in its infancy, experts said there needs to be more transparency and accountability when it comes to the claims companies are making.

In an effort to achieve carbon neutrality, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Disney, JPMorgan Chase, and Royal Dutch Shell have all 

 in recent years. In 2021, 40% more offsets were issued than in 2020, according to analytics firm 

But what is an offset, exactly? Essentially, it’s a credit that can be bought to compensate for carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gas) emissions elsewhere. So, in theory, if a company burns a lot of fossil fuels, it may invest money in preserving a forest or funding a solar farm to essentially cancel out its emissions.

The problem, MIT Sloan professor John Sterman told us, is that offsets are “mostly bunk.” In order to truly be effective, he said offsets need to meet four criteria:

“The offset has to reduce the emissions somewhere that would not have otherwise been reduced,” he said. “If you preserve a forest that would not have been cut anyway, you haven’t done anything yet.” Last year, a 

 found that airline offset predictions “were often inconsistent with previous levels of deforestation in the area, and in some cases, the threat to the trees may have been overstated.”

 that emissions are going down? Sterman gave an example of providing solar cookstoves to people who typically burn firewood. If no one’s measuring whether people use them or they break, then he said it’s not possible to verify that emissions are being reduced.

“Every ton of carbon that goes into the atmosphere warms the climate every day past the year 2100,” Sterman said. “Removing that ton of carbon in 50 years does not offset that impact.”

Carbon-offset forests have burned in wildfires in places like 

. In addition to fire, Sterman pointed out threats to trees like pests, disease, and drought: “All of those things are becoming more and more common as the climate warms, and so you can’t be sure that any carbon [absorbed by] the trees you’re planting will remain out of the atmosphere and you can’t claim it as an offset.”

According to Sterman, “You have to meet these conditions in order for it to be a legitimate offset. And this is very, very difficult.” Many offsets sold on the voluntary market don’t meet those criteria and are “far, far cheaper than they really ought to be" as a result.

In addition to the quality of the offset they’re buying, Niklas Kaskeala, chief impact officer at Compensate, a Finnish nonprofit offset brokerage, told us companies also need to be clear about what they’re including in their carbon-neutral calculations given that definitions and terms sometimes vary.

Often, he said, companies focus on their direct emissions—

 supply-chain emissions. While they can be a company’s greatest source of carbon emissions,  Scope 3 is typically the 

“That’s fine if you’re transparent about it,” he said. “But when you make these kinds of claims [about being] carbon-neutral and if you’re not transparent about which emission scopes have been included, then that’s a problem.”

Kaskeala said it’s better for marketing departments to communicate that a company isn’t perfect than “exaggerating things and greenwashing."

Ultimately, Kaskeala worries “the growth of the [offset] market will have zero or close to no climate impact” given what both he and Sterman described as the “Wild West” status of the market. But change is coming as the market evolves and regulations are proposed. France has already passed a law requiring that carbon neutrality claims in ads come with proof 

Thiago Chagas, head of legal affairs at nonprofit think tank Climate Focus, told us that companies need to look at decarbonizing and reducing their emissions—not just making up for them. Only after that, he said, should offsets be used to cancel out any other emissions as a last resort.

While not “a bad tool,” Chagas said, offsets are “definitely not supposed to be a replacement for action by companies in developed countries, that’s for sure.”

As offsets become more popular, more clarity is needed around the term to help determine whether companies are actually making a difference.

 Companies are claiming ‘carbon neutrality’—but what does that mean?

Phoebe Bain

Unfortunately, greenwashing is nothing new. But it’s been under the microscope more and more these days. Case in point: One marketing industry org is bringing together different stakeholders to discuss the topic and push for change this month.

The Institute for Advertising Ethics—a nonprofit educational foundation that recently partnered with 

 to provide staff and clients access to an ad ethics certification course—is hosting not one but two events on greenwashing.

On October 19, the first event will consist of an online symposium in which “a diverse panel of distinguished experts from government, academia, media, and the advertising industry” will chat about avoiding greenwashing, as well as the risks of it.

The institute claims it’s a first for the industry.

Its organizers plan to host another event in December based on the symposium’s findings, according to 

 The news is the latest sign that advertisers are increasingly being held to account for their role in the climate crisis. It comes weeks after Interpublic Group and its agencies (in what it 

 called “a first for the industry”) said they would review the “climate impacts of prospective clients…in the oil, energy, and utility sectors” before taking them on.

It also comes after the House Natural Resources Committee 

 last month on how PR firms have contributed to climate misinformation. One of the witnesses from the hearing, Generous Films founder and CEO Christine Arena, is set to speak at the Institute for Advertising Ethics’ event in October.

On Thursday, John Osborn, former CEO of OMD US, was appointed to 

 the US division of Ad Zero Network, an organization focused on reducing “the carbon impact of developing, producing, and running advertising to real net zero by 2030.”

an illustration representing greenwashing

 It’s the latest indication that the ad industry is increasingly being held accountable for its role in the climate crisis. 

The Institute for Advertising Ethics will host 2 events about greenwashing

“My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours?” is both a Smash Mouth lyric and a summary of this year’s Climate Week.

 to hear the latest corporate promises (and thoughts from 

 cast members?) at Climate Week NYC, new reports show the marketing industry’s role in the climate crisis continues to be…

 Clean Creatives and climate advocacy group Comms Declare released the second-annual “

” of PR and ad agencies working with fossil-fuel companies. All six holding groups were included, as well as independent agencies like Edelman, which Clean Creatives has 

 “one of the worst when it comes to fossil-fuel PR.” Publishers like the New York Times’s T Brand Studios and the Washington Post Creative Group were also called out.

This week, ad platform Good Loop released a 

 which found that 76% of US and UK marketers think the digital ad industry needs to do more to reduce carbon emissions. While 51% of US respondents said their organization plans to reach net zero in digital advertising at some point in the future, only 24% said it’s set targets to do so.

 from Harvard University and the Algorithmic Transparency Institute looked at European Union-based airlines’, car brands’, and fossil-fuel companies’ online activity this summer, determining that “social media appears to be the ‘new frontier’ of climate disinformation and deception.” While most of the companies the study looked at did not address the climate crisis on social, many sought to curate a green image or to direct audiences away from “companies’ core business operations.”

: Federal lawmakers are looking into the role of PR and advertising in the climate crisis.

The House Natural Resource Committee held a 

 last week on PR companies’ role in climate misinformation. The committee’s 

 found that they often “go far beyond typical marketing techniques” to help fossil-fuel companies, like making fake news sites and “engineering astroturf ‘citizen’ groups” in attempts to improve brand image and fight legislation.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform obtained internal documents from oil and gas companies as part of an investigation, revealing—among other things—that fossil-fuel execs “privately downplayed their companies’ own public messages about efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and weakened industry-wide commitments to push for climate policies,” according to 

A map of the US showing the "Extreme Heat Belt" on fire

 Marketers may want to do more for the planet, but reports reveal they’ve got a ways to go.

Climate Week 2022: A marketing recap

That’s one of the messages protesters from Greenpeace shared during their protests at Cannes Lions this year. The 

 was to direct attention to the climate crisis and call for an end to fossil-fuel advertising through different stunts, like 

WPP CEO Mark Read said Greenpeace was “

” to highlight the climate crisis, but the holding company intends to continue working with fossil-fuel giants, although he recently told Campaign that it does not want to “work with any energy company that seeks to frustrate the Paris Agreement.” Its current roster includes clients like BP and Shell.

Edina Ifticene, a campaigner for Greenpeace France, told Marketing Brew that Read’s response is exactly why legal action is necessary—and why Greenpeace is one of 40 organizations 

 the European Commission to ban advertisements from the fossil-fuel and transportation industries.

While Read’s response didn’t exactly inspire hope, Ifticene said, “It’s a win already to have a response from [WPP] because it means that we had an impact somewhere and they felt questioned, they felt challenged, and they felt that they had to respond,” she said.

Over the course of the festival, Ifticene said she was also encouraged by the number of creatives from around the world who expressed support for the protests, telling her and her colleagues that they no longer wanted to work with companies that “destroy the planet.”

“Five years ago, I think people would still say, ‘Maybe the fossil-fuel industry and [companies] like BP and TotalEnergies can be part of the solution. Nowadays, they’re like, ‘No, we know it’s greenwashing,’” she said.

In his response to Campaign, Read asked, “​​If energy companies can’t market or talk about the steps they are taking to move to a low-carbon economy, how do consumers choose to work with the companies that do?”

The issue, Ifticene said, is that fossil-fuel and transportation companies can see advertising as a form of “soft power” to improve brand perception among consumers and decision-makers alike. According to a 

 by researchers at Harvard, “ExxonMobil advertisements worked to shift responsibility for global warming away from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers.”

Ifticene said Greenpeace targeted its protests at large holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis, given how much money and power they have in the industry, as well as the executives who decide which companies to work with.

They also wanted to address the festival’s role in those decisions. By giving out more than 300 awards to fossil-fuel and transportation companies since the Paris Agreement, Ifticene said, “You are encouraging these agencies to keep working with [them].”

To get Greenpeace’s message across, Ifticene said a team of campaigners, action coordinators, comms officers, and more—led by UK creative Emily Buchanan—brainstormed and came up with a campaign message around the “this is fine” meme, which shows a dog sitting and drinking coffee in a burning room.

She said the dog in the meme “really represents the passivity, the denial of a dramatic situation,” Ifticene said. “And we felt like the ad industry is really in that position.”

Gustave Martner, a former Cannes Lions winner and current head of creative at Greenpeace Nordic, previously won two awards at the festival for work he did with Volkswagen and Scandinavian Airlines. As part of Greenpeace’s protests, he 

 during the opening ceremonies to return his awards.

“We said, ‘That’s how we can talk to the entire audience,’” Ifticene said. “That’s a great story to tell because you used to belong to them, and they can hear you out.”

While Martner was banned from the festival, demonstrations continued and wrapped up with protesters placing a banner on the Palais about fossil-fuel ads “burning the planet.” With the event now done, Ifticene said more protests are planned to continue generating support for a potential ban in the EU.

As for whether the ad industry can regulate itself without the EU stepping in? “We’re not stupid. We know that corporate engagement doesn’t really work,” Ifticene said. “They start with a CSR engagement and then nothing happens and then they change their minds. And so that’s why we need regulations.”

How the organization orchestrated a weeklong protest of fossil-fuel advertising

Emission impossible: Greenpeace’s Cannes takeover

November: In the US, it’s a month of many names—election month, Thanksgiving month, you get the point. Here at Marketing Brew, we’ve dubbed it “sustainability month,” exploring what our industry is doing (or says it’s doing 👀) about this whole end-of-the-world thing. If you’re new ’round these parts, here’s what you missed:

Terrifying fact alert…digital ads could account for roughly .08% of total greenhouse emissions. Amy Williams, cofounder and CEO of 

ad-tech B corp Good-Loop, chatted with Marketing Brew

 about what it’s doing to make digital marketing more sustainable.

Companies that still make execs jump on a plane every time they need to grab a 15-minute coffee with its CEO are perhaps more obvious bad actors than digital advertisers. That’s why we also spoke with agency execs about 

how the environment factors into their post-lockdown work-travel habits

. Spoiler alert: It’s definitely a factor.

Edelman announced plans to review its client list this month…

after said list was absolutely dragged by climate activists

You’ve heard of recycling, but how about upcycling? We talked to oat-milk brand Oatly about 

 even though they might be counterproductive.

Marketing Brew reporter Ryan Barwick asked Ashley Sherman, senior manager of ESG strategy for Delta Air Lines, about how exactly an airline can call itself “sustainable” in our 

a picture of a protester holding a sign that says "There is no Planet B"

From post-lockdown travel policies to upcycled branded merch.

A recap of Marketing Brew’s sustainability stories

Google’s update has come at a time when ad agencies find themselves 

 with how to run an environmentally friendly shop, as well as when many agency employees are not only still working from home, but are also (in some cases) still wary of traveling because of Covid.

 With all of this taken into consideration, how, if at all, are agencies changing their travel policies?

As it turns out, agency leaders are actively wrestling with new travel policies for business models that were very IRL-based pre-Covid. And just like the return-to-the-office debate, some agency execs aren’t itching to return to the skies full-time, in part because of flying’s negative environmental consequences, especially for those based where train travel is popular.

Sam Kelly, managing partner and CMO at AKQA, told Marketing Brew that while some AKQA employees have been traveling for client meetings (as well as going on location for productions), their trips mainly involve trains or cars. That’s in line with AKQA’s larger goals of a 20% reduction of energy use intensity in each studio per year, a 90% recycle and reuse rate, and a 20% reduction in carbon and greenhouse-gas emissions per year.

“The last time I personally traveled for work was January 2019, where I helped set up the AKQA Dubai studio. If that was today, most of it would have been done virtually,” Kelly wrote in an email.

TBWA\Worldwide has started to dip a toe back into business travel via plane. But Philip Brett, TBWA\Worldwide’s chief operating officer, told us the agency is only flying when necessary. “In 2019, ‘necessary’ would mean ‘important’…now it would mean when video conferencing will not suffice. The threshold has changed,” he explained, and, no one who is uncomfortable traveling by plane is required to.

Brett, who is based in London, added that more people at the agency are open to other forms of travel besides planes now too. “I’ve been to France this year, and I went by train. I was hoping to go to the Netherlands…by train, but they hadn’t unlocked the routes as fast as our desire to travel. But I think people are more open to other forms of travel, as long as it’s efficient and works in a timely fashion,” he told us.

For companies providing services rather than producing goods (like ad agencies), travel is often a big-ticket item in their environmental footprint, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business professor Vishal Agrawal told us. Agrawal leads Georgetown’s 

, which explores how companies can balance sustainability and ESG with other business considerations.

He said that post-lockdown periods offer an opportunity to address business travel, because some of the shame around choosing not to be in-office for work has been removed alongside remote work’s rise.

Specifically, Agrawal pointed to the “reduce” part of the classic “Reduce, reuse, recycle” framework. “Ideally, you think about how much you can reduce your travel, period. But if that’s not possible, you focus on reducing carbon footprint by opting into greener alternatives,” such as choosing flights with lower-carbon emissions.

Kelly told us that since the pandemic, AKQA’s travel policies have changed to better align with the agency’s environmental priorities. “We are finding more sustainable ways to travel, from reducing the number of flights we take to encouraging the use of two wheels over four with cycle-to-work schemes. In Amsterdam, 90% of our employees come to work by bike,” he said.

“We see business travel being at least 50% less than pre-pandemic levels. Any air travel needed CFO approval during the pandemic, and this remains in place as individual countries emerge from the crises,” he explained.

Brett added that while TBWA is still working on a “formalized approach” to travel post-lockdown, environmental consciousness is certainly a factor it’s considering while making these decisions. Much of that concern stems from TBWA\Worldwide’s younger employees, who often ask leadership what is being done about sustainability policies and approaches on a higher level and what they can do, Brett said. But he added that more senior folks are game to find a green travel solution as well. “I don’t think we’ve had any dissenting voices,” he told us.

Of course, the marketers of Madison Avenue weren’t jumping on planes for no reason pre-Covid—there are 

 to IRL meet ups. But the agency leaders we spoke to agree that in-person interactions’ being “good for business” isn’t so black-and-white.

Brett said he still thinks it’s important to travel via plane when cultivating relationships with new clients for a global business in particular—but that it can be done reasonably and efficiently. He told us the days of jumping on a plane for a one-day meeting are likely over, and that a more sustainable choice could include sending fewer people on these trips.

Plus, Agrawal said agencies opting to cut back on travel could use their greener stance to differentiate themselves from competitors, or they could pass on some of what they save on travel to clients to create a cheaper “remote” package.

image of earth with planes flying around it

Just like the return-to-the-office debate, some agency execs aren’t itching to return to the skies full-time, in part because of flying’s negative environmental consequences.