About 15 years ago, Exxon Mobil ran a TV commercial that never mentioned oil or gas. Instead, it featured a friendly-looking Exxon scientist describing his work turning algae into “biofuels that we could someday run our cars on.” These new fuels would “help solve the greenhouse problem,” he said, because “they absorb CO2.”
The ad reassured consumers that Exxon – the world’s largest multinational oil company – cared deeply about finding cleaner, climate-friendly alternatives to oil and gas. What it left out was this: Exxon was investing only a tiny fraction of its earnings – an average of about $29 million a year at the time – in its algae project while continuing to spend billions on expanding its oil and gas operations.
Although the ad is more than a decade old, the strategy behind it continues today. Activists have long criticized major oil companies for using ads like these to greenwash their image, portraying themselves as stewards of the environment while reaping huge profits from selling fossil fuels. Fossil fuel products have been definitively linked to a warming planet, which is causing extreme storms, flooding, drought, and fires worldwide. Now, more critics are focusing on the advertising and public relations agencies creating these misleading campaigns.
“Fossil fuel companies have long known about the harms of their products but have worked with ad agencies to spread disinformation and maintain demand for oil and gas,” says Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives, one of several groups turning the heat up on the ad and PR industry for spreading climate denial and disinformation.
The outcry has even reached the United Nations. In June 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres denounced ad agencies as “enablers of planetary destruction.” He called on them to drop their fossil fuel clients and urged countries to stop advertising fossil fuels.
Critics argue that until the advertising industry stops greenwashing its fossil fuel clients, the world will continue to careen toward a catastrophic climate breakdown.
In return for helping delay climate action, says Meisel, “they’ve made billions of dollars selling more oil and gas while the rest of us are digging out our homes, or trying to figure out what’s left of our homes, after a massive storm.”
“It’s hard to fight back against seductive messaging that these well-heeled agencies have carefully crafted,” says Carol Gregory, vice president of communications and marketing at CLF. “That’s why it’s important to acknowledge their role so we can hold them accountable too.”
When Advertising Becomes Disinformation
For decades, fossil fuel companies have used disinformation campaigns to delay and derail political action on climate change despite knowing as far back as the 1970s that using their products could lead to devastating consequences. A 2021 study by Brown University researchers Robert Brulle and Carter Werthman shed light on the role of the PR sector as “a key organizational actor in climate politics.” As such, it has actively worked on the “conceptualization, design, and execution of communications and political campaigns” for fossil fuel clients.
The popular catchphrases we’ve heard and sometimes used ourselves harken back to clever copywriters and creative directors at PR firms: terms like, for instance, “clean coal” and “renewable natural gas.” Such deceptive labels have become so widely adopted, Brulle and Werthman note, that they have become part of “the taken-for-granted discourse regarding climate change and subsequently shaped the public debate about the issue.”
One way ad companies avoid criticism for doing this work is by greenwashing themselves. According to a recent analysis by DeSmog, an investigative journalism organization covering climate disinformation, the industry’s six biggest companies have a playbook for presenting themselves as pro-climate action. The moves range from claiming that these engagements are helping fossil fuel companies transition to cleaner energy to exaggerating their progress on cutting pollution from their own operations to promoting their work for climate action groups.
It’s unclear how much money the ad and PR sector earns for devising climate disinformation, but clues emerging over time suggest it’s a lot. In just one recent example, when the ad and PR giant Havas won a major media contract with Shell in 2023 and then another for PR in 2024, the industry trade press estimated the deals were worth $45 million and $240 million, respectively, based on Shell’s past spending with other agencies.
Disinformation as Usual as Climate Change Ramps Up
As the reality of climate change becomes impossible to deny, PR and advertising companies have been portraying their fossil fuel clients as heavily invested in solving it. These ads often turn out to be new vehicles for spreading disinformation.
In 2022, documents subpoenaed by a congressional investigation into climate disinformation revealed that Exxon paid BBDO – the agency that created the algae campaign – $68 million from 2016 to 2019 for just three commercials that promoted carbon capture and storage technology as a major solution to greenhouse gas pollution, knowing that it would be marginal at best.
In Europe, activists have been pushing back on these campaigns.
In 2011, following a formal complaint to the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, Exxon’s algae-based biofuels campaign was banned for being misleading. While the spot accurately noted that algae absorb CO2 as they grow, the regulator said it left out the fact that burning the resulting biofuel would release that carbon back into the atmosphere. The ASA has since banned other fossil fuel ads.
In 2021, an activist coalition began campaigning to ban fossil fuel advertising entirely in the European Union. Since then, Amsterdam has banned ads from fossil fuel and aviation companies, France has banned coal, oil, and gas advertising, and Edinburgh has banned fossil fuel ads on some public properties. In September 2024, The Hague enacted a comprehensive ad ban prohibiting ads of fossil fuel products and heavily fossil fuel-dependent sectors like aviation, carmakers, and cruise ships.
In February, two UK climate groups filed a complaint to the Organization for European Cooperation and Development, charging that advertising giant WPP broke the organization’s climate and human rights guidelines with its work for BP, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and related industries.
Push-back is Harder in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the Constitution’s free speech guarantees in the United States make it difficult to ban even misleading advertising. After all, it took four decades of legislative actions and legal settlements to remove tobacco advertising across TV, radio, billboards, and public transportation.
However, it is illegal for a company to market dangerous products to the public as safe. So, since 2018, over a dozen cities, counties, and states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, have sued the fossil fuel industry under consumer protection and fraud statutes. They seek to hold gas and oil companies accountable for actively misleading the public about the risks of using fossil fuel products and knowingly spreading climate disinformation.
While those cases don’t name ad and PR agencies as defendants, recent cases charging an ad agency with spreading misleading claims that harmed public health have set a precedent. In 2024, Publicis Health, part of the France-based advertising giant Publicis Groupe, agreed to a $350 million settlement with several states for its “predatory and deceptive marketing strategies” for OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma.
It’s “a great example of the ad and PR companies being roped in on the damages as well,” says Meisel, and sets a precedent that might eventually factor into the consumer climate fraud cases since “those lawsuits involve internal documents where [the fossil fuel industry’s] agencies are named and involved.”
An Industry on the Defense
As climate change’s overwhelming effects become more apparent, some within the advertising industry are taking action. Clean Creatives’ annual “F-list” documents ad and PR agencies with fossil fuel contracts. The 2024 edition lists over a thousand contracts involving nearly 600 agencies and 332 fossil fuel companies across 70 countries. Boston-based Mullen Lowe is mentioned due to its relationship with Pertamina, Indonesia’s state-owned oil and gas company, which had almost $76 billion in revenues in 2024.
Thousands of smaller agencies and industry professionals have signed the Clean Creatives pledge to take no new fossil fuel contracts, says Meisel, but so far, they don’t include the sector’s “Big Six” global giants – Dentsu, Havas, Omnicom, Interpublic Group or IPP, Publicis Groupe, and WPP.
As for the calls of UN chief Guterres to drop fossil fuel clients, “within the context of the Big Six holding groups and the advertising trade bodies, [there’s been] absolutely no response whatsoever,” says Jonathan Wise, a 20-year ad and PR veteran and co-founder of Purpose Disruptors, a nonprofit working to “transform the ad industry to work in harmony with the natural world.”
“The silence suggests that influential advertising organizations do not or currently cannot engage on this difficult topic despite being encouraged by the UN Secretary General.”
As an ad man, Wise says, “My job was basically, ‘what do we need to say about the brand to get people to buy more stuff,’” he says. “The primary purpose of my job was to increase household consumption,” which increases carbon emissions.
New Tools Determine How Advertising Affects Emissions
Purpose Disruptors has developed a framework that agencies can use to determine how much their advertising increases carbon pollution, termed “advertised emissions.” Japan-based Dentsu is the only major advertising company that has released advertised emissions data and has yet to announce any efforts to lower them.
In this new era of “safe” places to live and work being ravaged by extreme wildfires and floods, even the people who create the fossil fuel ads are getting fed up with their agencies.
A 2024 survey by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, or IPA, found that nearly half of ad agency employees felt their industry was having a negative impact on climate change.
“People who work at these companies live in big cities, and they want to have families,” says Meisel. “They are empathetic people because they’re good communicators. And that’s the problem you have to solve if you’re an ad professional or if you’re a leader of an agency.”
Wise’s group has long organized pub nights where ad industry employees who care about climate change can meet. “When they see other people in exactly the same spaces with exactly the same concerns, it provides a sense of solidarity,” says Wise, who estimates that about 5,000 people are part of his group’s network.
Both Wise and Meisel believe the U.S. needs stronger laws holding the ad industry accountable for deceptive advertising. Despite the Trump administration’s seismic pro-corporate policies, “supporting legislators and legislation still counts,” says Wise.
“There’s a reason there are laws in the United States to protect people from false advertising, says CLF’s Gregory. “Those laws also need to be applied to the ad industry in greenwashing that paints fossil fuel corporations as climate champions. They’re peddling snake oil, and these deceptive practices need to stop.”
Emily Gertz is an author and journalist who specializes in climate and the environment and is a contributing editor at DeSmog.