Right now, activist group Clear Creatives launched its annual F-List report, publicizing 1,010 contracts between 590 advert and PR companies and over 400 fossil gasoline firms. All of the contracts dated from 2023 and 2024, and had been dug up by Clear Creatives’ lead researcher, Nayantara Dutta, with assist from strategic insights firm Supply 9.

“In relation to local weather and sustainability, an excessive amount of of the advert trade has not modified for the reason that Mad Males period. They’re nonetheless utilizing the identical assumptions and approaches that they’d have in 1970,” Duncan Meisel, govt director of Clear Creatives, informed ADWEEK. “Clear power funding is double that of fossil fuels. However as a result of they’ve their heads caught on this fossil gasoline mindset, they’re lacking this vitally vital power transition.”

The report comes simply three months after the United Nations Secretary-Common António Guterres took the stage on the American Museum of Pure Historical past in New York to sentence promoting and public relations companies working for fossil gasoline firms, calling them “mad males fueling the insanity.”

“Cease appearing as enablers of planetary destruction,” Guterres informed the gang. “Cease taking over new fossil gasoline shoppers from right now and set out plans to drop your present ones.”

A extra complete view of adland

Clear Creatives was based in 2020 as a undertaking of Fossil Free Media, and goals to stress advert and PR companies to drop fossil fuel clients because of their outsized impression in fueling international warming. Over 1,200 companies have signed the marketing campaign’s pledge to refuse to work with fossil gasoline shoppers. The primary F-Record, a reputation impressed by the A-Record of companies revealed yearly by Advert Age, was launched in 2021 and listed 90 companies.

However whereas the listing of companies with fossil gasoline ties has grown, that’s not as a result of these contracts are multiplying, the group stated. Proof for a lot of of those connections is absent from the companies’ web sites and as an alternative buried in hard-to-find paperwork. The nonprofit has merely gotten higher at discovering them in public filings, LinkedIn’s advert library, inventive portfolios, PR company directories, and lobbying databases. Every contract has no less than three completely different sources to make sure accuracy.

Clear Creatives