‘The Goal of These Ads Is to Distract From Their Actual Business Model’

Janine Jackson interviewed Clean Creatives’ Duncan Meisel about oil industry greenwashing for the June 11, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

1989

Janine Jackson: Humorist Dave Barry once wrote that

the value of advertising is that it tells you the exact opposite of what the advertiser actually thinks. For example, if the ad says, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,”  the advertiser is desperately concerned that this Oldsmobile, like all other Oldsmobiles, appeals primarily to old farts like your father.

Different but related is a line from the movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising, in which a character explains: “Everything is high in something. And if it’s not, it’s low in something else.” (That explains popcorn packaging declaring it “gluten free,” for example.)

Advertising is about redirecting thought and emotional energy away from what someone doesn’t want you to think about, and onto what they do. It matters if it’s potato chips or car insurance or sneakers; it matters tremendously if it’s the fate of whole communities, and the planet.

But although we have a general understanding that fossil fuel companies are invested in their public image, inasmuch as it affects regulation they might face and their ability to do business, we don’t often hear about the role of advertising in greasing the wheels of climate disruption, of sheltering polluting extractive companies from the worldwide, time-constrained effort to get them to stop.

That’s where our next guest’s work comes in. Duncan Meisel is campaign director at Clean Creatives, a group of PR and ad professionals who see the threat of climate disruption and their industry’s role in it. He joins us now by phone from Austin, Texas. Welcome to CounterSpin, Duncan Meisel.

Duncan Meisel: Thank you so much for the chance to talk.

Fossil fuel ties of WPP agencies (chart: Clean Creatives)

JJ: Let’s start with the most recent thing: Clean Creatives released an ad mocking an ad from the big ad agency WPP. Could you fill listeners in on their ad, and what made you feel it was ripe for some explanatory satire?

DM: For context, WPP is the world’s largest holding company of advertising firms. So they’re basically a conglomerate of many, many ad firms themselves. And inside WPP, they have a number of clients who are Big Oil companies: BP, Exxon, Chevron, Shell. And WPP does all kinds of work for them—recycling their image, sharing misleading advertisements—and they do include some PR companies, so doing the PR inside game as well.

And so WPP, on Earth Day this year, made a pledge to bring their operations to net zero, and they said that they would save 5.4 megatons of carbon dioxide by taking this pledge. And if they were a manufacturer of cars, or widgets, or really anything, that would be extremely meaningful: Bringing your operations to net zero is basically what we are asking the world to do in the Paris climate agreement. The problem is that they are doing this advertising for fossil fuel companies that are the biggest polluters on the planet.

WPP (5/12/21)

And so they released a very snazzy video—they are very good at what they do—talking about “zero,” just the power of the idea of zero.

JJ: Mmm-mm.

DM: And we thought it was very interesting that they were also doing “zero” about fossil fuels. And their executive CEO, Mark Read, was asked about their work for fossil clients when they made their pledge, and he said, “Oh, no, we’re not going to look at that. We’re not going to deal with that. We’re not going to change anything about our relationship with them.”

And so we thought, if you’re really pledging zero, to do zero, that’s something that we should talk about.  And so we actually went and we did the math on the amount of carbon dioxide that their fossil fuel clients produce. And while WPP may be saving 5.4 megatons of carbon, the fossil fuel companies that they work for produce over 2,000 megatons of carbon.

And so when you think about it: You’re an advertising company; your job is to increase the sales of your clients. And the point at which they are increasing the sales of their clients by essentially any amount, they are wiping out the impact of that 5.4 megatons of carbon that they have saved. So that’s kind of the math and the big picture, and why we thought this was an important conversation.

JJ: Just in case folks missed it in there: WPP was saying they, themselves—as an advertising conglomerate—were going to get to net zero, like within their offices, within their company; that’s what they were saying in that ad.

DM: Exactly. So, like, fewer flights, renewable energy in your offices, reusable cups, you know, all stuff that’s good….

JJ: Sure. And then you’re going to go to work doing an ad for Shell, you know?

DM: Exactly.

Duncan Meisel: “Every time there’s a real challenge to their power, they say, ‘Oh, we’re ready to change, things are going to be different this time.’” (image: act.tv)

JJ: OK. Well, I think of that Dave Barry thing whenever I see an ad for a polluting company, and it features fish swimming in sparkling water, or the sun rising over a field of flowers: These companies are really encouraging us to think of their impact on the world as the opposite of what we know it to be.

And Clean Creatives has been on to this, and you say that this is actually a messaging effort that’s more than 100 years old, which blows my mind—the idea that fossil fuel companies are part of the solution. Can you talk a little bit about that?

DM: Yeah, this has essentially been the message that fossil fuel companies have been sending since public relations even existed. The person who invented the press release worked for Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And Rockefeller, Standard Oil, was a huge, huge monopoly conglomerate. And they were involved in a coal miners’ strike in Colorado, where dozens of coal miners ended up being murdered; they were killed while on strike, and it was a huge scandal. (This was about 1914.)

And Ivy Lee, the guy who invented the press release, told Rockefeller, “OK, here’s what you’ve got to do. Don’t call them radical, don’t call them extremists. Just go there and talk to them and say that you’re ready to make change.”

And that’s what he did. He went to Colorado, and he sat down, and he says, “Well, we’re very sorry, we feel this is terrible.” And then he went back, and just kept doing the same things he was doing before, making the money the same way he had previously. And so that’s kind of been the story ever since then, is that every time there’s a real challenge to their power, they say, “Oh, we’re ready to change, things are going to be different this time.”

Lorillard Tobacco, 1999

And I think there’s a really important parallel also here to the tobacco industry and the liability and legal challenges they faced up until the ’90s, when it really came to a head. And the same thing happened; they’re playing from the same playbook.

I found this great ad from 2000, or something like that, from Lorillard Tobacco, and it was this huge, stylized, sort of psychedelic poster; it says “Tobacco Is Whacko.”

And what they found was actually that showing these ads to teens increased teen smoking.

JJ: Right, right.

DM: They actually were counterproductive. And the same thing is happening now; they are showing off these ads where they say, “Oh, we’re ready to move past our business model. We’re ready to change.” And the goal of these ads is to distract from the impact of their actual business model, and to delay action that would otherwise regulate their ability to make profits on pollution.

JJ: It also dovetails with a corporate media message, a kind of implicit message, which is: Leave it to the experts.

Some folks get outraged when we learn that gas companies are advising the government on pipelines, for example. But then other people are saying, “Well, but they’re the ones who know it. They know the business, right?”

The corporate PR fits in with a media responsiveness that says, “Well, if you’re talking about an industry, you should include an industry expert.” So there’s kind of a “frictionless where there ought to be friction” relationship between advertisers and media, I think.

The Hill (4/6/21)

DM: I think that’s the case. And there was an interesting example of this, where Washington, DC, publication The Hill was hosting a conference—it’s part of their business model; they invite people to come get together and talk—and it was about the clean energy future. And I was curious about it, so I went.

They had a bunch of government people there, Gina McCarthy from the White House, and some senators. And I was looking at the sponsors, and the sponsors were the American Petroleum Institute, the private equity front group and then Philip Morris. And I was like, “Why is Philip Morris part of this conversation about clean energy? This is a really strange thing.” And what I realized is, not only are these, of course, Big Oil borrowing the strategy of Big Tobacco, but if Philip Morris tried to sponsor a conference about tobacco and smoking cessation, no one would come.

They would know it was corrupt. They couldn’t; they’d say, “Absolutely not.” But somehow the American Petroleum Institute, despite being this multi-decade effort to deny climate change, defer climate change action, they still have some veneer of credibility, that they can show up to a conference about climate transition and still be seen as legitimate.

JJ: Yeah, and the only folks left out are us, the public.

Friends of the Earth International (6/9/21)

Finally, there’s a new report from Friends of the Earth International, Corporate Accountability and the Global Forest Coalition that’s called “The Big Con,” and that’s talking about how companies like Shell and Microsoft and Nestlé are lobbying for net zero targets that don’t actually reduce their emissions, that they’re using distraction techniques to give the impression that they’re reducing emissions and getting to net zero, when they actually are not.

So there’s a reason to keep a sharp eye on what’s even meant by the language, because if corporations can get the term defined down, then ads can use it and have people think it means something it doesn’t. There’s just a lot of pieces to this machinery of public opinion that we don’t often hear about. And one of those, I guess, is what do we even mean by “net zero”?

DM: Yeah, and “net zero” is an important concept. And I think it is important to, in a way, defend the integrity of it…

JJ: Yeah.

IEA (5/18/21)

DM: …because the International Energy Agency did a really great study that came out a week or two ago, where they talked about what is the best pathway to achieve the net zero climate goals laid out by the Paris climate agreement. And they had a line in there that said, “There is no need for any fossil fuel infrastructure to be built beyond what we already have.”

“There is no need.” And the most important building block of achieving net zero, of doing the Paris climate agreement, is to rapidly reduce the amount of fossil fuel emissions; this is the biggest driver of the problem.

And so, when you have these fossil fuel companies saying, “We want to have net zero by 2050,” there’s several layers of problems there. One is that they may be relying on things like offsets, where they’re like, “Yeah, well, we’re going to keep burning oil, but we’re going to plant a bunch of trees,” and there’s a lot of questions and dangers there.

JJ: Right.

DM: But then, often, even that, they’re not even really planning to do that! You know, Shell had this amazing disclosure—when they actually had to disclose to their investors what their plan was—they said, “Shell’s operating plan and budgets do not reflect our net zero by 2050 goals.” And so sometimes they’re not even planning to do the “bad”version of net zero…

So there’s a lot of layers there that I think need to be examined. And I think it’s really important for there to be really ripe debate about what net zero means, to make sure that it is a concept that is essentially protected.

JJ: And transparency about what folks are actually doing versus what they say they’re doing.

DM: Yes. Precisely.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Duncan Meisel. He’s campaign director at Clean Creatives. You can learn more about their work online at CleanCreatives.org. Duncan Meisel, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DM: Thank you so much for the chance to talk.