Ad agencies step away from oil and gas in echo of cigarette exodus

It’s night. A little boy opens the door to his father’s room. “Dad, I’m scared,” he says. The father carries the boy back to his bed, tucks him in and clicks on a night light. “It’s only human to care for those we love,” says an offscreen voice, “and also help light their way.”

This is the start of a recent commercial for Chevron, which goes on to say that the company is bringing “affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy to America.” It is the kind of feel-good ad that has long drawn criticism from environmentalists, who argue such messaging, which they call greenwashing, may mislead viewers about the extent of their climate change commitments. Weeks after the commercial was posted on YouTube, where it has racked up more than 200,000 views, a Chevron refinery in California leaked some 600 gallons of “petroleum and water mixture” into the San Francisco Bay.

Because of this ad and others like it, Greenpeace USA and other environm­ental groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on March 16 that accused Chevron of “consist­ently misrepresenting its image to appear climate-friendly and racial justice-oriented.” Chevron did not comment.

The FTC complaint is part of a larger movement that lately has been gaining support from some key players in the promotion of the oil and gas firms.

Guy Hayward, global chief executive of Forsman & Bodenfors, an international ad agency, said its New York office has signed a pledge to no longer work for oil and gas producers, utility companies, and their lobbyists.

Signing the pledge was partly symbolic: Forsman & Bodenfors has done work for the Norwegian oil and gas giant Equinor and is known for its award-winning Volvo campaigns. “It’s about raising awareness in the broader creative community,” he added, “so it becomes a topic in the same way tobacco became a topic. And now I don’t know a single person who would work on a tobacco account.”

Dozens of other ad agencies have signed the same pledge, which was put together by the advocacy group Fossil Free Media. The effort, which is known as Clean Creatives, is managed by Duncan Meisel, who conceded it would be difficult for ad agencies to say no to fossil fuel dollars during a pandemic.

Green activists are not the only ones who have been applying pressure on ad makers. Amsterdam voted in December to investigate how to block oil and gas ads from its streets. Calls to ban such advertising or prevent fossil fuel firms from sponsoring sports teams have emerged in elsewhere, too.