In an era in which attention is often only ever partial, puncturing the collective consumer inertia with a complex message is no easy feat. Yet it is a challenge which Extinction Rebellion has risen to. The peaceful mass protests orchestrated by Extinction Rebellion have been nothing short of transformational, catapulting the crisis to the top of the media agenda. While a firm line from business leaders including former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney has underlined the responsibility of business to make tangible changes. The scale of the climate crisis might make it easy for brands and businesses to believe themselves inept at making an impact. Yet according to the Carbon Majors Report, only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world’s carbon emissions.
Polman issued a stark warning in The Guardian that “we are about to commit the biggest intergenerational crime in the history of mankind”. Noting that if a business fails to address issues of inequality and climate change, a lot more people are going to be dissatisfied, feel not included, or left behind. A state of play which means, according to Polman, business leaders must step up and move outside of their comfort zone to take personal risks.
Finding this willpower isn’t always easy. For the advertising industry, reaching the tipping point when it comes to acting on the climate emergency often comes second place to the urgency of hitting the next quarter’s targets. Yet some signs overlooking the importance in the pursuit of the urgent is no longer a long-term business strategy. Business leaders must increasingly look beyond short-term profitability to address the pressing need to reduce emissions. For an industry based upon the success of its people, the increasing propensity of those people to speak out, boycott and opt-out of working for brands which don’t reflect their values means that maintaining the status quo is no longer an option for ad agencies seeking to build a creative competitive advantage.
With this in mind, we asked a selection of industry leaders to have their say on how the industry can address the climate crisis. You don’t have to be on the wrong side of history. This is an industry capable of quickly shifting global public opinion and behavior. Forget 11 years to save the planet; the latest science suggests we have less than 100 months. Meanwhile, advertising continues to drive the high carbon lifestyles and hyper-consumption that is killing us. “Never was so much destroyed by so few for so little. Never did so much need saving by so many so fast.”
You don’t have to be on the wrong side of history. This is an industry capable of quickly shifting global public opinion and behavior. You have an opportunity to lead where governments have failed; to use your skills to share a new message. Tell the truth about the climate & ecological emergency, across campaigns on billboards and screens. Speak to your brands; let them know their coveted Gen Z audiences will be gone if they don’t act now. Help us vision this urgent change as a positive opportunity!
Collaborate as an industry: refuse to work for toxic brands; drop them together. Support climate strikes. Send staff on secondment to Extinction Rebellion and join them on the streets in October. Demand that tall US CEO who just flew intakes this deadly seriously. Front-load spectacularly, if not for the planet and the billions in the global South currently fighting for survival, then do it for yourself because there won’t be any pop-up street food, holibobs, or human rights when the crops fail.
The advertising industry’s responsibility for what they promote, both good and bad, is an endlessly fascinating question. But in a time of climate emergency, more important than assigning credit and blame is looking at opportunities for change. We have the technical solutions, but the political will is lacking, and weak-willed politicians blame a fickle public whose commitment to decarbonization may not survive a bit of real-world inconvenience.
But we have the technology to change that too. The ad industry has a budget of around $700bn a year, mainly to spend on promoting unsustainable consumption. Imagine if that billion-dollar persuasion machine was promoting quality of life rather than quantity of stuff.
How could companies like McDonald’s use its marketing spend to promote a plant-based diet rather than a meat-based diet? And when it comes to greenwashing, could the ad industry refuse to participate in the dirty business of selling the oil industry? BP spends most of its capital expenditure on hunting for more oil and gas. It spends most of its marketing budget promoting its ‘green’ credentials. If everybody withdrew their support, as artists, performers, and some advertising agencies have done, they would eventually be forced to match their green advertising slogans with real green investment.
Should we all be doing more to tackle climate change? Yes of course. So why would the advertising industry be any different? The key question, for us as individuals, companies, governments, international organizations, is what can we best do? What are our obligations and opportunities? Framed this way, the questions for the advertising industry become what are our obligations to tackle climate change i.e. how might we have contributed to climate change and how do we stop doing so, and what are our opportunities i.e. where can we make a positive contribution to the issue?
What can we stop doing? Taking work from clients who aren’t actively reducing their contributions to climate change; earning money from high carbon clients, the sort of companies from whom the investment community is increasingly divesting; promoting unnecessary and over-consumption.
We can use our two unique platforms of influence to promote positive action. We are or should be, trusted advisors to the business. We should be the ones advising them that climate change is an existential threat to their business and that we can help them find new ways to make their business sustainable in the new reality. And we could also aspire to be the trusted guardians of people. We have our hands on the levers of behavior change. We spend every day thinking of ways to change people’s behaviors, to prefer that washing powder, to shop in this store, to drive that car. These skills are the ones needed more than ever by the world to halt the human causes of climate change.
Morally neutral is no longer acceptable, to the talent who wants to work with us, the businesses who need our best advice, and the regulators who govern us. So yes, it’s in the advertising industry’s interests to be doing more to tackle climate change.