40 years of climate communications: what comes next for creatives?
In the year that the Secretary-General of the United Nations called for a ban on ads for oil and gas, more and more creatives in the commercial creative industries are considering their own role in the climate crisis. For example, D&AD’s CEO, is an active member of Purpose Disruptors. A highlight of this collaboration has been taking part in the six month learning journey Reimagining Advertising; Towards a Thriving Future. The programme culminated in a white paper with three shifts for the advertising industry to adopt.
Creatives for Climate is a collective of change-agents using creativity to drive climate action. Here, in the 2024 D&AD Annual, Stephanie Klotz, Communications & Marketing Director at EIT Climate-KIC and Advisor to Creatives for Climate, explores failed strategies, clever campaigns from the 2024 awards, as well as where creatives might best leverage their talents for change.
The climate crisis demands action. It demands both institutional change and individual mindset shifts. But climate communications have failed to spark that change. For decades, we climate communicators relied on the power of information. We thought that by just putting the truth out there, the hard reality of climate science would motivate change. It didn’t.
Slowly we became more emotive, appealing to a collective sense of generational solidarity, calling attention to what would happen if we didn’t act. As we are reminded in Boiler Filmes’ evocative film for UN Global Compact, even in the mid-80s, legendary scientist and TV personality Carl Sagan told the world, “If we don’t do the right thing now, there are very serious problems our children and grandchildren will have to face.” While the problem received attention, it was just pushed to “out there, someday”. To this day threats are seen as distant, and urgency is perpetually postponed.
So climate communicators upped the ante. We started turning the scary facts into scary communications. Does anyone remember the film An Inconvenient Truth? It marked a turning point and since then we have bombarded audiences with thawing ice caps, skinny polar bears, ticking planetary time bombs and ominous red-coloured maps, and more recently devastating wildfires and flooding.
“Turns out fear-based messaging is fantastic at calling people’s attention but is abysmal at inspiring action”
After decades of this type of climate communication, we still have not seen massive collective action. What we have discovered, though, is why it hasn’t worked. Turns out fear-based messaging is fantastic at calling people’s attention but is abysmal at inspiring action, let alone the long-term, sustained action that is what this moment requires. Doom and gloom lead to despair and anxiety, and humans are not wired to live in a state of fear for too long. So eventually, people overload and tune out. In his book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall writes, “We do not accept climate change because we wish to avoid the anxiety it generates.”
But there is another reason. Doomsday messaging often doesn't work because people don’t like to contemplate problems they don’t think they can fix. Social science research has shown that creating the feeling of being part of the solution is a much more effective way to change someone’s mind about the reality of a problem than educating about the problem itself.
That is where advertising comes in. For as long as the industry has existed, it has been able to tap into the human imagination, and conjure desire when there was none. It made everyday objects like shoes and cars sexy. It provoked behaviour changes amongst audiences and influenced buying habits, and how people spend their leisure time. And this is what the climate crisis needs the most. We need not only to find better ways to connect people to problems and inspire hopeful attitudes, but we also need to make taking action desirable, aspirational, and doable. Creatives, you are being called upon. Now more than ever scientists and climate communicators need the tried and tested skills of creatives to spur action.
Carl Sagan Message, Boiler Films
A great example is the D&AD award-winning Oblivia Coalmine piece by Lucky Generals. Despite being one of the primary causes of the climate crisis, in 2022 fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion, or 7.1 percent of global GDP, while pension funds across the globe continued to pump billions into oil, gas and coal. Yet, this isn’t exactly common knowledge. The ad exposes this truth in a way that is engaging, dare I even say sexy. And in just one short minute, we are asked an important question: do you know where your pension fund is invested? It is a simple action for people to take, motivated by the suggestion they may have been tricked. The film drove people to take action towards shifting to a green pension on the Make My Money Matter site.
In a similar vein, innovative marketing tactics were used to create Eart4, a company on the brink of bankruptcy, and launch its IPO on the stock exchange. This “stunt” targeted business leaders and business-related media like never before and it shook the very way they think about financial transactions.
Both of these campaigns represent new ways of applying the creative industry’s skills. They suggest that it can do more than emote and inspire. It can enable action, or even non-action, in the name of the climate emergency. Who can forget Patagonia’s classic “Don’t buy this jacket” Black Friday campaign, encouraging people to buy less? Increasingly the creative industry must begin unpicking its legacy of selling stuff fuelling overconsumption, and start encouraging sustainable living. Whether it’s promoting local holidaymaking, eating plant-based or simply spending time in nature instead of shopping, the industry will be called upon to unravel overconsumption in ways that entice, lure and engage.
But before it can do that, it must also start to unravel itself. As a climate advocate it is hard to forget that when, in the 1970s, oil and gas’s own scientists began to understand global warming and its effects, they turned to the creative industry. They engaged ad agencies to initiate what would become a decades-long greenwashing campaign that has shaped the narrative on climate change to this day.
Oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, have spent billions greenwashing their images. BP, for example, began engaging in ‘green marketing’ as far back as 1997 and in 2000 introduced their cheerful sunflower logo. They rebranded from “British Petroleum” to “Beyond Petroleum” with a $200 million campaign, only to quietly abandon the new name to become BP after the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
“In all this, the advertising industry has been an enabler.”
What has been the most devastating, though, has been the perfidious use of marketing and PR to spread disinformation. The fossil fuel industry has attacked climate science and spread doubt, conjured the notion of individual carbon footprints to shift responsibility onto individuals and even changed the language of global warming to climate change to make it seem more innocuous.
In all this, the advertising industry has been an enabler. This past June, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, called for a ban on ads for oil and gas. He said many in the oil, gas and coal industries had “shamelessly greenwashed” with lobbying, legal action and massive advertising campaigns. What’s more, Guterres called ad agencies “enablers to planetary destruction” and urged them to stop taking fossil fuel clients “from today”. These are serious accusations which cannot be taken lightly.
It is a moment of reckoning for the creative industry. It must recognise the role it has played in fuelling the both overconsumption and climate crisis, but also embrace the role it must play in solving it. It must take a deep, hard look inward and ask the tough question of what next? What will be our legacy?
Thankfully, more and more creatives are doing this introspection and communities are forming. Creatives for Climate (or C4C), for example, is a network with about 40,000 members – spanning entrepreneurs, employees and ethical agencies – working to unlock the power of influence, marketing and persuasion to decarbonise our world, but also to break free from its destructive legacy. C4C works to build capacities and upskill creatives, to activate them in support of climate organisations, and importantly it instigated the Ethical Agency Alliance uniting and championing frontrunners.
It is a heavy lift, no doubt; but the time is now. While working to change itself, the creative industry has a massive role to play in helping society work on itself. Whether it is hijacking climate deniers news feeds or providing a sick note for striking students, creatives are being called to harness their abilities to find new ways to encourage action. It is no longer just about evoking an emotional response but rather inducing true and lasting behavioural change. And it can’t come a minute too soon.