The PR industry isn’t ready to crack down on greenwashing

TJ Jordan
·8 min read
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The Scoop

More than a third of board members at the world’s largest advertising and public relations firms — all of which have made public commitments to slash their own carbon emissions — also hold roles at high-emissions companies, according to analysis compiled by DeSmog.

With combined revenues of $67 billion in 2022, Omnicom Group, WPP, Interpublic Group (IPG), Publicis Groupe, Dentsu, and Havas dominate the communications industry, and have hundreds of subsidiary agencies around the world. And of their 64 total directors, 22 maintain ongoing roles at companies in high-emissions industries such as fossil fuels, aviation, and plastics.

These ties, climate campaigners argue, represent a conflict of interest: All of these firms except Omnicom have public net zero goals, and all six are members of a voluntary industry initiative pledging to reduce in-house greenhouse gas emissions. Yet — campaigners posit — these board ties limit the firms’ willingness to stop producing marketing and public relations material that promote the fossil fuel industry, or portray climate-damaging companies as green.

Whether or not these board links are the reason behind any unwillingness to push for more aggressive climate action, the advertising industry at large certainly lags behind other comparable sectors. Banks, for example, also work with polluting companies and have also resisted activist pressure to drop fossil fuel clients entirely, but have at least set intermediate steps that ultimately pressure their clients to do more to accelerate the energy transition. The PR industry, by comparison, sets low or no expectations for its high-carbon clients, and continues to discount a large portion of its own carbon footprint.

DeSmog sent requests for comment to the six holding groups and the directors named in this story via both company media teams and their personal company email addresses, as well as to the other firms named in this story. WPP declined to comment, while none of the other companies, or any individual directors responded.

TJ and Rachel's View

The six giant communications firms talk a good game, and their positive rhetoric helps them recruit a new generation of talent, as young creatives we interviewed said they were more likely to join a company that had good sustainability bona fides. Several younger staffers we spoke to at the six companies expressed frustration and anger over their employer’s lack of green credentials.

But agencies and industry bodies have been slow to acknowledge the sector’s true climate impact. While five of the six companies have now set net-zero goals, these plans only account for emissions generated by their own business operations, such as employee travel, energy used to power office buildings, and the production of advertising campaigns.

The industry carbon-cutting initiative they have all signed up for, Ad Net Zero, does not ask members to consider the potential wider climate impacts of their work, such as the risk that producing campaigns that enhance the images of heavily-polluting clients could deflect pressure to cut emissions.

It also does not account for “advertised emissions,” a concept recognized by the United Nations-led Race to Zero campaign, which focuses on getting businesses, universities, cities, and others to eliminate their carbon emissions no later than 2050. “Advertised emissions” aim to capture the climate impact generated by the uplift in sales caused by advertising campaigns. The figure is estimated by factoring advertising spend against industry data for return on advertising investment, and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with each additional unit of product sold. A 2023 report by Japan’s Dentsu estimated that its 2022 advertised emissions were 32 times the size of its operational footprint. However, the company is yet to include advertised emissions in its net zero goal.

In 2022, meanwhile, IPG published a policy directly addressing the issue of working for fossil fuel clients — something the other five have yet to do. The policy has a number of requirements, including that clients must set specific emission reduction goals aligned with achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. However, IPG employees have previously told DeSmog that the policy only applies to new clients, and in November, DeSmog reported that McCann, an IPG advertising agency, will pitch to retain its relationship with Saudi Aramco when the current contract runs out this year.

The risks to board members and to the companies’ own bottom lines of these stances are significant, climate advocates argue. In its 2022 annual report, WPP mentioned the “increased reputational risk associated with working on client briefs perceived to be environmentally detrimental.” Dentsu has also mentioned these risks in public documents.

Know More

Of the six companies analyzed by DeSmog, Omnicom’s board had the highest proportion of board members with ties to high-emissions companies, with six out of 11. New York-based IPG followed closely behind Omnicom, with four of its 10 board members holding roles in industries such as natural gas, shipping, and plastics. Four of Dentsu’s nine directors, three of Publicis’ 13 directors, and three of WPP’s 12 directors have ties to polluting companies or sectors as well. For Havas, the figure was two out of nine.

At Omnicom, Valerie Williams holds a non-executive directorship at the Devon Energy Corporation and Leonard S. Coleman Jr. holds a non-executive directorship at Hess Corporation, both major U.S. oil and gas companies. Ronnie S. Hawkins, a non-executive director at Omnicom, is currently a partner at Global Infrastructure Partners, which invests heavily in fossil fuel infrastructure, such as pipeline and refinery projects. (In its 2022 annual report, Omnicom stated that 2 percent of its revenues — around $286 million — came from the oil and gas, and utilities sectors.)

At WPP, board Chair Roberto Quarta has two current and five past ties to polluting industries, the highest combined total for any individual in DeSmog’s analysis. The current ties are being a partner at two fund managers, Gulf Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, whose portfolios include significant investments in fossil fuel infrastructure and logistics firms.

Publicis Director Antonella Mei-Pochtler is a member of the supervisory board at Eni Plenitude, a gas and renewables subsidiary of Italian oil company Eni. Despite Eni’s heavy promotion of investments in renewables, it invested 15 times more in fossil fuel-dominated business segments than Plenitude in 2022, according to research and advocacy group Oil Change International.

At Dentsu, Andrew House is a current board member at Nissan Motor Corporation. Nissan, one of the world’s largest carmakers, ranked near the bottom of a 2022 Greenpeace analysis of the auto industry’s efforts to transition toward a lower-emitting business model.

At Paris-based Havas, Chairman and CEO Yannick Bolloré and board member Marie Bolloré, his sister, have ties to high-emissions industries via the oil logistics division of the family-run Bolloré Group — which owns Havas parent company Vivendi. (In 2023, Havas won a major contract with Shell to manage the company’s worldwide advertising spots.)

Similar examples below the parent company level also exist, but are not included in DeSmog’s analysis. For example, John Dawkins is co-chair of GRACosway, one of Omnicom’s leading political lobbying agencies in Australia, while also holding chair and non-executive director roles at mining companies Precious Metal Resources Ltd and Tiaro Coal Ltd, respectively. GRACosway and Dawkins did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.

“Board directors have been adamant publicly about their dedication to climate action and their companies’ pivot towards net zero,” said Sarah Chow, an investment analyst at the Sydney-based ethical pension fund Future Super. The fund has been trying to engage with Publicis and WPP on their work for high-carbon-emitting clients. “But behind closed doors and after public [annual general meetings], our relations with these directors have gone cold.”

The View From Regulators

For the better part of two decades, advertising regulators in Australia, France, the U.K., and elsewhere have taken stands on greenwashing. In June 2023, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority banned adverts by Shell, Repsol, and Petrobras that made misleading claims about their investments in renewable energy. Shell’s adverts had been created by WPP’s Wunderman Thompson (now VML), and Repsol’s by DDB Spain, an Omnicom agency.

Room for Disagreement

Companies in the industry argue they can move only as fast as their clients, and exacting excessive pressure would only serve to drive those clients to even less scrupulous rivals. As publicly listed companies, the six big advertising and public relations firms also argue they have a duty to shareholders to court and work with big clients — which, given the nature of the global economy, necessitates working with high-emissions companies.

Senior executives at the major advertising and public relations agencies face a number of other constraints in doing more to combat climate change. For one, they are largely still judged on short-term financial metrics, Nadeem Khan, who leads the graduate program in Board Practice and Directorship at the U.K.’s University of Reading, said. “You need a board and CEO that are accepting of an organisation’s needs to adapt as renewed, evolved forms in the long-run, otherwise eventually it may not compete as markets themselves evolve,” he told Semafor.

Khan also argued that the pace of change was constrained by the parent company structure of these six firms, which limits the power of subsidiary agencies to make their own decisions on issues such as climate strategy.

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