Editor’s note: Paul Mottram argued the F-List is a blunt instrument holding back progress. Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, fires back. His rebuttal below defends the F-List’s purpose and takes direct aim at the critique.
For five years, Clean Creatives has published the F-List, a comprehensive database of ad and PR agencies working with fossil fuel companies. This database serves as a valuable guide for brands and professionals who are often unclear about the polluting clients their agencies may be working with.
The reason for this is simple: the coal, oil, and gas sold by fossil fuel companies are the primary cause of the climate emergency, which is doing immense damage to major brands in agencies’ portfolios and harming the future of the staff who work in the creative industry.
The effects of climate change have already cost the creative industry hundreds of millions of dollars. For instance, insurance companies like State Farm are cancelling ad buys due to extreme weather events, and consumer buying power is being wrecked by the impact of climate change on household finances. It’s easy to see similar problems affecting chocolate, coffee, and grocery in general, as well as healthcare, and other major categories.
Meanwhile, we estimate that marketing spend by coal, oil and gas majors is less than 1% of global marketing spend in total. In other words, fossil fuel companies are not the world’s biggest advertisers, but they are the most dangerous. In a hotter, more dangerous, more financially precarious world, removing these companies from your portfolio is sensible business.
We always receive feedback on the report, and do our best to incorporate friendly clarifications where they make the F-List more useful. We want to respond to some of the views shared in Campaign Asia to ensure creative professionals understand the importance of the F-List as a tool.
There is a serious flaw in Paul Mottram’s op-ed about this year’s F-List: namely, the inability to name even a single fossil fuel company that is supposedly on the path to a climate transition. Not a single one is mentioned—and I would argue not for lack of research.
The F-List only includes fossil fuel companies that are resisting climate action; that category just happens to include all of them. Last year, 95% of electricity capacity installed worldwide was renewable, and global oil demand potentially peaked, but the companies on the F-List all still spent more than half of their capital on fossil fuel production or generated more than 50% of revenue from fossil fuels.
These companies embody a backwards-facing strategic vision that is harming the planet when we could easily be shifting into a full-throttle energy transition. Former fossil fuel companies such as Vattenfall are not included, nor are companies like Engie that are rapidly shifting their revenue streams.
The argument that other agencies will always step in to support fossil fuel clients is one of the oldest arguments made about Clean Creatives, and one of the flimsiest. Fossil fuel agencies are already in the minority and provide a shrinking set of skills to polluters. Campaign UK’s School Report 2024 found that 75% of agencies don’t work with fossil fuels, and another 15% were planning to reduce their work with fossil fuels.
Every agency pitch deck always begins with a slide about its unique contribution and skills. Declining to work with fossil fuels means making sure your unique and irreplaceable skillset is not used by polluters to harm the planet.
We firmly believe that the ad industry is better off without work with fossil fuel clients, and that transparency and accountability are a vital path to achieving that goal. The best agencies are the ones that are able to think strategically about the world’s biggest problems, and continuing to work with the coal, oil, and gas companies that are destroying the planet and economy is short-term thinking at its worst.
Duncan Meisel is the executive director of climate campaign group Clean Creatives.
