Launched in 2021 by the marketing services industry pressure group Clean Creatives, the annual F-List was designed to expose the agencies and their “mad men” helping fossil fuel companies deny or delay climate action. Its latest iteration, released on September 23, continues that tradition.
Credit where it’s due, the F-List has been valuable in two main ways. First, and among many other organisations, it has helped shine a spotlight on the role of advertising and PR in promoting consumption of the fossil fuels that are so harmful to the planet. Second, it has done much – arguably more than any other initiative – to promote holding agencies responsible and accountable for the client choices they make.
F-List fails, however, in terms of both its flawed approach and its effectiveness in driving meaningful change.
The F-List oversimplifies, treating all fossil fuel companies and their activities as equally and absolutely harmful, ignoring the potential for some to contribute meaningfully to a just energy transition. It’s arbitrary, too, targeting fossil fuel companies but not other businesses that enable them. The naming-and-shaming tactic also disproportionately impacts ordinary employees, who lack decision-making power on client choices and, in today’s job market, have limited ability to choose alternative employers.
No approach is perfect, F-List supporters may argue, and omelettes can’t be made without breaking some eggs. But beyond quibbles with the approach, there are more fundamental reasons why the F-List is misguided.
First, it focuses on the wrong thing. Fossil fuels are both legal and essential (for now) for many people’s livelihoods. Yes, there are bad actors among the fossil fuel industry, but oil, gas and coal are integral to our way of life today. Just stopping them isn’t remotely reasonable, practical, or fair to those whose jobs or access to affordable energy currently depend on them. This doesn’t justify the worst that oil companies (or their apologists, paid or otherwise) do. It simply recognises that the climate challenge is systemic, and therefore the necessary transition is complicated and difficult.
The F-list promotes the idea that stopping a particular set of bad guys is the most important thing. That’s not only naïve, but also feeds into an absolutist, polarised debate that hinders the understanding needed for real progress.
A second problem is that boycotting fossil fuel companies’ agencies won’t make any meaningful difference. No agency has a monopoly on talent, so fossil fuel companies will find a way to keep communicating (whether it’s cynical climate denial/delay/doubt-seeding or authentic, useful transition activities), whether they have a large or small selection of agencies to choose from. The price they pay might go up, but that’s not going to make any difference to an industry for which throwing money at a problem is a modus operandi.
The third reason the F-List approach is flawed is that we, as an industry, can do so much better. While not one of the world’s most economically significant sectors, our industry has disproportionate potential to make a difference by virtue of what we do for a living: we are brilliant and make people think, feel, and act differently.
But to what end? Here are three suggestions.
- Advocate for better or tighter regulation of fossil fuel company behaviour. Agencies that believe passionately that advertising fossil fuels is wrong should use their energy and creativity to lobby their governments to regulate or ban them. In the UK, a group including Clean Creatives (bravo!) as well as Creatives for Climate and Purpose Disruptors has this year successfully lobbied to table the subject in its parliament. Other countries, like Canada and France, are already actively considering similar regulations. And city-level governments from Amsterdam to Sydney are enacting their own local bans.
- Tackle the climate misinformation and disinformation that certain fossil fuel apologists peddle. The International Communications Consultancy Organisation is doing pioneering work in this area, which deserves much wider industry attention and support. The opportunities to build on this work with a climate focus are manifold and urgent.
- The world’s climate activists – including Clean Creatives – have raised awareness of the climate challenge to the point that 89% of people worldwide want their governments to do something about it. And that suggests a more ambitious opportunity for the world’s best communications strategists and creatives: to take on the challenge of channelling that demand for action into support for practical, systemic climate solutions such as putting a price on greenhouse gas pollution via carbon pricing.
Clean Creatives has played a valuable role in bringing the role of fossil fuel marketing into the spotlight. And it has encouraged agencies to take perhaps a greater degree of responsibility for their client choices than they might otherwise have done. But it’s time to move on from protesting the problem by naming and shaming to building awareness and advocating for constructive, practical, and ideally systemic solutions. The scale and complexity of the climate challenge demand nothing less.
Paul Mottram is an independent communications consultant focused on climate change and an Executive Fellow at the World Economic Forum.
Editor’s Note: Clean Creatives’ executive director Duncan Meisel has shared a response to this piece. His rebuttal will be published separately in full.
