This blog was first published on my Medium profile.

Is H&M’s Conscious Collection actually climate conscious?

Back in 2019 Norway’s Forbrukertilsynet (Consumer Authority) revealed that they were investigating fast fashion giant H&M’s sustainability claims.

Their investigation came under the Marketing Control Act in Norway, Section 2 of which states that marketing cannot contain ‘an incorrect or otherwise misleading representation which is likely to influence the demand for or supply of goods’.

Essentially, if brands mislead their customers in any way, it’s illegal under existing Norwegian law.

“H&M are not being clear or specific enough in explaining how the clothes in the Conscious collection are more ‘sustainable’ than other products they sell.”

Bente Øverli, Deputy Director of Norway’s Consumer Authority

The Consumer Authority were particularly concerned that H&M may be unable to back up their claims about the sustainability of their business, and of their H&M Conscious collection in particular. 

This concern stemmed from the lack of explanation offered by H&M about exactly how their Conscious clothes are being manufactured:

“As H&M are not giving the consumer precise information about why these clothes are labelled Conscious, we conclude that consumers are being given the impression that these products are more ‘sustainable’ than they actually are.”

Bente Øverli, Deputy Director of Norway’s Consumer Authority

If we look at H&M’s own website content, this lack of precise information becomes clear pretty quickly.

They did once have a webpage entitled ‘HM Conscious Explained’, now removed.

Luckily, I have the receipts.

The HM Conscious Explained page (ironically) did a very poor job at explaining why the Conscious Collection gets that name.

Maybe it’s just me, but for an ‘explanation’ I’d expect a little more detail than just two short and sweet paragraphs.

They claim that the H&M Conscious Collection is their ‘most environmentally sustainable’ products – but given they’re a fast fashion brand that is well known for being very unsustainable, the ‘most’ here doesn’t give us much comfort.

In terms of explaining why these products are ‘conscious’ and ‘sustainable’, the only justification given is that they use up to 50% recycled material (or 20% for cotton products) in production.

However, they don’t go into detail about the types of items they’re recycling, how they’re recycled, how they’re produced, what the carbon footprint of these products is compared to their other ranges, or even what their definition of ‘sustainable’ is.

It just doesn’t feel very transparent or trustworthy.

Alongside this explanation comes their marketing and photography of the collection, all of which centres around ‘green’ imagery of Conscious-clad models surrounded by lots of grass and plush green plants:

But is all this ‘green’ actually just an indication that we’re being greenwashed by H&M’s marketing department?

Let’s consider all we do know about the environmental impact of fast fashion brands like H&M. 

Between 1992 and 2002 we’ve decreased the amount of time we keep our clothes by 50%. 

The fashion industry churns out over 1 billion items of clothing every year, producing 1.2 billion tons of CO2 equivalent at the same time, accounting for 5% of global greenhouse gases [1].

Furthermore, cotton is one of the main crops used in the production of clothing. 

Although it’s often portrayed as an eco-friendly option compared to synthetic alternatives, cotton is actually an incredibly thirsty crop. It takes 20,000 litres to grow 1kg of cotton, which is the amount needed to make one t-shirt and one pair of jeans [2].

And that’s not to even mention the social impacts of fast fashion.

It’s well known that clothing factory workers are underpaid and overworked, and there’s also evidence of mental and physical abuse in the factories. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh highlighted the terrible conditions of the industry, with over 1300 people killed when a clothing factory collapsed. H&M was one of the brands being manufactured in that factory.

With this said, I’m pretty sceptical that a fast fashion brand can be sustainable at all.

Sustainable [adj]: able to be maintained at a certain rate or level; conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.

H&M specifically have two main strands (as far as I can tell) to their ‘sustainability’ aims.

The first is their Conscious Collection of clothing, which we’ve already discussed.

The second is their clothing recycling service, allowing customers to take old clothing from any brand to their stores to be recycled.

If we examine this clothing recycling service, H&M’s sustainability becomes even more questionable. The vast amount of clothing produced by fast fashion, and our growing demand for this as consumers, means that it would take fast fashion brands like H&M 12 years to recycle what they produce in just 24 hours. With this fact in hand, their recycling service starts to seem incredibly ironic. They’re encouraging consumers to recycle their old clothing, whilst they continue adding to the problem at an alarming rate themselves.

Plus, a significant percentage of the clothing that they produce goes immediately to waste, never even reaching the stores for consumers to purchase.

In 2017 it was announced that the Vasteras power plant in Sweden would be going fossil fuel free, partly because they had been contracted by H&M to burn their defective clothing. After opening that year, by November 2017 the plant had burned 15 tons of discarded clothes from H&M [3].

And so, H&M’s recycling service becomes incredibly hypocritical.

So why do they really offer this service? And what’s the true incentive behind the development of their Conscious Collection?

The answer to that is simple.

Their primary goal is to maximise profit, at all costs. 

That’s why when you do take a bag of old clothes back to H&M to be recycled, you receive a £5 off voucher for your next purchase at H&M. The whole scheme is a marketing campaign to retain customers and persuade you to buy more clothes, contributing further to the fast fashion industry’s profits at the cost of the environment.

This is backed up by research into the fashion industry too.

A review of consumer sales between 2013 and 2018 by researchers at the Stern Center for Sustainable Business, of New York University, found that products that were highlighted as ‘sustainable’ would sell much faster than products which were not [4].

So, by giving the impression that they are an environmentally conscious company, and by selling products that are marketed as ‘conscious’ and ‘sustainable’, H&M are doing themselves a massive favour in terms of sales and profit. This is what lies at the heart of their sustainable style focus.

The unreliability of their sustainability claims are clear in the below statement from Helena Helmersson, H&M’s Head of Sustainability at the time of the Conscious Collection launch (who then became Chief Exec, before stepping down) when she was asked how H&M could prove and ‘guarantee’ their eco credentials:

“I don’t think guarantee is the right word…A lot of people ask for guarantees: ‘Can you guarantee labour conditions? Can you guarantee zero chemicals?’ Of course we cannot when we’re such a huge company operating in very challenging conditions.”

Helena Helmersson, H&M Head of Sustainability in 2019

When huge high-street brands like H&M claim to care about climate change, and to be deliberately working to improve their sustainability credentials, it gives us a way to feel like we’re engaging with sustainable fashion and boycotting all that fast fashion stands for.

It’s an easy option: H&M is cheap, accessible, and it’s what we know. We don’t have to stop shopping, we can shop at our high street favourite and still be seen as an eco warrior.

But this doesn’t feel authentic.

It’s clear that H&M are making movements towards being more sustainable, and as a huge company every small step they make is significant. 

However, if we rely on fast fashion brands to make the industry sustainable, then we’ll be waiting a long time.

Given the resources that they use and the waste they produce, I ultimately think that there’s a fundamental contradiction at the centre of the idea that a fast fashion brand can sustainable, which marketing and labels cannot fix.

Buy less, and buy from the brands who truly have ethics and sustainability at the heart.

References

[1] Facts from https://7billionfor7seas.com/fast-fashion-facts/

[2] Fact from WWF https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/cotton

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-power-plant-h-m-coal-burn-vasteras-stockholm-oil-discarded-products-a8073346.html

[4] ‘Research on IRI purchasing data’, NYU Stern (March 2019)

This blog was first published on my Medium profile.

E.On’s latest advertising campaign is titled ‘It’s time.’

It centres around a short video which depicts people going about their everyday lives whilst completely oblivious to the climate apocalypse of floods, fires, tornados, and ice cracks that surround them — even singing a tune with the lyrics ‘time is on our side’.

The message is clear: the climate crisis is here, we need to act, and E.On has the solutions to get us out of the mess that surrounds us.

Is this a genuine message of solidarity by a company changing its ways? Or another energy company greenwashing campaign?

Let’s break it down.

We’re all to blame for climate change

The main issue I have with E.On’s ‘It’s Time’ campaign is that it places individual people at blame for failing to act on climate change.

The entire narrative of the campaign is normal people, going about their lives, failing to pay attention to the impending doom of climate emergency descending upon them.

It’s the same narrative that the oil and gas industry has had for years — the most well-known example being BP (with the help of ad agency Ogilvy) deliberately popularising the idea of an individual carbon footprint to shift blame away from the fossil fuel industry.

The E.On campaign is no different.

It depicts a world where individuals are entirely naive to the climate crisis, and where businesses and governments have nothing to do with the inaction — they aren’t even present in the campaign.

Even worse, the people in the video are all preoccupied with their phones and laptops whilst fires and floods rage around them, as you can see here:

And here:

And here:

It tells us that we all care more about scrolling through the virtual worlds of TikTok and Instagram than we do about the deterioration of the real world that surrounds us.

I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s insulting.

And it’s especially insulting because it comes from a company that has been a major fossil fuel energy provider for decades. It comes from a company who is quite literally to blame for those fires, floods, ice melts — we’ll look more at E.On as a company later.

This narrative is even evident in the way E.On’s team talks about the It’s Time campaign in the media, suggesting it was absolutely deliberate.

Scott Somerville, UK Chief Marketing Officer at E.On, said of the campaign:

“Whether it’s governments, businesses or homeowners, there’s a huge amount of positive intention when it comes to sustainable energy, but rarely do any of us bring enough urgency to the situation.”

And Ross Newton, the Creative Director at the advertising agency who produced the campaign, House 337, said:

“It’s incredibly important that we all act on the climate crisis, but we didn’t want to use the same old shock tactics. Instead, we wanted to highlight the behaviour that we’re all guilty of.”

Interesting, eh.

There truly is nothing subtle about the energy industry’s avoidance of blame on climate change these days. 🤯

Inspiring panic and guilt, not action

Let’s also consider how the climate crisis is being depicted within the campaign.

Remember that Ross Newton, the Creative Director of ad agency House 337 who produced the campaign, stated: “we didn’t want to use the same old shock tactics”.

And yet what we see is an apocalyptic landscape of fires, melting ice, rising floods, and tornados.

Contrary to what Newton says, this does seem pretty much like the ‘same old’ story of doom and gloom.

There are two big reasons that this is entirely ineffective messaging for a sustainability-focused marketing campaign.

Firstly, whilst there’s no denying the truth of the picture — as we know all too well, extreme weather events are becoming increasingly regular and severe as a result of climate change, as are floods and wildfires — this kind of dark, apocalyptic view of the climate crisis does nothing to inspire change. Instead of motivating action, it inspires only feelings of panic, hopelessness, and guilt.

Secondly, even though climate impacts like these are becoming more and more visible in the media across the world as they increase in frequency, they can still feel like a faraway, abstract issue, rather than something that is impacting us closer to home. Pasting a background of climate impacts behind images of everyday life simply isn’t going to make an audience more likely to take action.

Sidenote: check out Climate Visuals for insights on what imagery has real impact in communicating climate, and an evidence-based photo library.

Didn’t you know? E.On has the solution to climate change!

Of course, despite trying to hide behind a charitable message, E.On’s ‘It’s Time’ campaign is just that: a marketing campaign. If it wasn’t good for the business, they wouldn’t do it — after all, that’s how fossil fuel companies got us into this mess in the first place.

The video ends with a ‘call to action’.

That might sound like a good thing, a call to arms as we all rise up against climate change. Not quite. In the world of marketing a call to action or CTA is the prompt at the end of a piece of advertising which asks the audience to take a desired action, like ‘read more on our blog’ or ‘get 10% off today using code CLIMATE’.

In this case, the final voiceover message of the campaign is: “E.On have the solutions to help us all live more sustainably” (note the ‘us all’ creeping up again), and the call to action is to go to E.On’s website and take a look at their sustainable energy offerings: renewable energy tariffs, heat pumps, solar panels, and EV chargers.

For the past few years, E.On have been gradually re-branding themselves from fossil fuel energy supplier to green energy supplier.

Now, from the messaging and content on their social media profiles, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled upon a small community energy organisation or a climate campaigning organisation.

Here’s a snapshot of the E.On Instagram bio, for instance.

And if you go to the It’s Time campaign page on the E.On website, it’s the same story:

What’s also striking on the webpage is the message of urgency: “… we all need to act. Not by 2030. Not by next year. Now.”

And that’s true of their Instagram content too:

It’s striking because underneath this recent sustainable re-brand, E.On has a long history of compromising the environment through their oil and gas activity — they even proudly share their history since 1923 on their website.

Not just the environment; they’ve compromised people too. Like the 4,700 people in the Nenet tribe of Siberia who have been displaced from their land and faced declining health due to pollution, to enable the construction of a huge pipeline to extract oil and gas, part-owned by E.On.

So that message that ‘we all need to act right now’? It’s pretty ironic.

You might be wondering if it’s possible that E.On have truly now changed their ways — and it’s a good question.

So, let’s take a closer look at those sustainable solutions that E.On offer.

First, renewable energy.

E.On claim to offer their customers 100% renewable energy.

They produce their own renewable energy from biomass, largely at two plants in Sheffield (Blackburn Meadows) and Lockerbie (Steven’‘s Croft). Biomass is only a sustainable source if the biomass being burnt for energy is a waste product.

It’s very difficult to find any information on the actual sources of wood in Sheffield and Lockerbie — the E.On website states they use ‘local waste wood only from British sources’ but no details are given on what this is, which makes it feel questionable.

The Blackburn Meadows biomass site in Sheffield.

The rest of the renewable claim is entirely down to REGOs. This means that E.On is buying certificates of origin from actual renewable energy producers, without actually adding any renewable energy to the overall supply — read more on this from Good Energy.

Next, the home energy products: heat pumps, solar panels, EV chargers.

These are all much needed to make our homes more energy efficient. But, the reality is that all of these home energy add ons are only efficient if our homes are already efficient — well-insulated with no leaks or draughts — and most UK homes simply aren’t. There needs to be much more focus on home retrofit and rolling out heat pumps and local energy networks at a systemic level before these are truly ‘solutions’ on a large scale — and the UK government is currently failing pretty hard at that.

But, in the meantime, it makes E.On look good if their marketing focuses on their shift to sustainability.

And that’s truly the crux of the matter.

Sustainability looks good today.

That’s why companies like E.On are making campaigns like ‘It’s Time’.

Because, contrary to the message of the video, people are very aware of the climate crisis and they care deeply about it.

Instead of people’s inaction, it’s companies like E.On that are more concerned about continuing to line their pockets with profits than preventing its impacts.

Because E.On remain the UK’s second biggest energy supplier, and their profits doubled in the first half of 2023, with UK sales of £12.6 billion.

And that kind of money would be game-changing for community energy organisations like the Low Carbon Hub in Oxford or Carbon Coop in Manchester who are actually doing the work to transform the UK’s energy system for the better.

So maybe It’s Time we focus our energy elsewhere.

This blog was first published on my Medium profile.

Vestiaire Collective’s latest marketing campaign — titled ‘Think first, buy second’ — brings light to the textile waste dumped on farflung streets as a result of the overconsumption driven by the fast fashion industry.

The campaign centres around a super short animated, AI-generated video which shows piles of discarded fast fashion littering Times Square, with the message: ‘what if fast fashion waste was on your doorstep’.

Which is also being shared across social media, both the video and static images of the messages within it — like this one on the Vestiaire Collective Instagram page:

It works nicely as a continuation of the video from their Black Friday campaign from last year (2022), when they began banning certain fast fashion brands from the Vestiaire Collective platform.

That video used footage from the actual locations where fast fashion waste is dumped, like the Kantamanto market in Ghana, where 15 million items arrive from the global North each week 🤯.

So, last year Vestiaire Collective showed the reality of where textile waste ends up, and this year they’re emphasising this through imagining a world where, instead of hidden away in Ghana, it ended up in world famous tourism spots like Times Square.

And, it’s not just a marketing campaign.

Vestiaire Collective are coupling the marketing with real action — they’ve banned an additional 30 fast fashion brands from being listed on their second hand marketplace, including serial greenwasher H&M, as well as the likes of Zara, Uniqlo, and Bershka.

It’s a great example of sustainability marketing done right.

Why?

Three key reasons:

• Bringing climate impacts closer to home
• Focusing blame on the fast fashion industry, not on individual consumers
• Working with trusted messengers to deliver an educational message.

All of which are tactics which are proven to work when it comes to climate communications that really cut through.

Let’s explore these three elements a little closer.

Bringing climate impacts closer to home

The status quo is that climate change is seen as a faraway, abstract concept.

It will happen far in the future to people living on the other side of the world. That leads to a lack of urgency because, unfortunately, we humans aren’t great at planning for the long-term, we tend to respond only to what we see as immediate threats.

Because of this, it’s vital for climate communications campaigns to bring climate impacts closer to home — emphasising the impacts happening right now, to people like us, in places like this.

And that’s exactly what Vestiaire Collective do with their campaign.

They’ve picked up the piles of textile waste from the market stalls in Ghana that fast fashion brands use as a dumping ground, and placed them in Times Square — a location that is not only well-known amongst western consumers as a famous tourist spot, but also as an advertising hotspot.

Focusing blame on the fast fashion industry, not on individual consumers

The fossil fuel industry began a trend of blaming individual consumers for climate change a long time ago — emphasised nicely by BP creating the term ‘carbon footprint’ as a way to do just that.

Other climate change fuelling industries, like fast fashion, have been quick to follow suit.

They create ‘sustainable’ lines that represent 0.0001% of their overall stock, or they put the onus on individuals to donate or recycle their garments (*cough cough* and then don’t forget to buy more *cough cough*). H&M, we’re looking at you on both of these examples.

Even sustainable brands often focus their marketing on consumers making behavioural changes to cut carbon emissions. Replace your body wash with our soap bar. Subscribe to our plastic-free, organic veg box. And so on.

So, it’s refreshing to see Vestiaire Collective resist this narrative on two fronts.

First, and foremost, the blame is most certainly placed on the fast fashion companies in this campaign.

Nowhere do Vestiaire Collective suggest that the piles of textile waste are the fault of individuals buying fast fashion. No, they are absolutely the fault of fast fashion brands for overproducing and driving overconsumption.

Secondly, the campaign is also pleasingly self aware.

Whilst Vestiaire Collective is not a fast fashion brand itself, it is a business and it does, therefore, have significantly more influencing power than an individual when it comes to cutting carbon emissions and driving systemic change.

And the campaign doesn’t shy away from that. The main action of the campaign is that Vestiaire Collective is removing fast fashion brands from the marketplace. The brand is using its own power to take action against fast fashion itself.

Of course, there is a secondary ask within the campaign, which is for consumers to buy second-hand (as good as it is, it’s still an advert for the marketplace). The name of the campaign focuses on this: ‘Think first, buy second’. In fact, if I had one note for Vestiaire Collective on the campaign it would be to change the overall campaign name to keep that primary focus of blame on the fast fashion industry.

Working with trusted messengers to deliver an educational message

Historically, the least trusted voices have been those producing most of the messages on climate change.

From politicians, to journalists, to economists and business owners, there are a whole host of prominent, public-facing people out there who have made the climate crisis seem like a debate, rather than a lived reality.

And on the other side of the coin, communications to raise awareness about climate change and its impacts and solutions have been predominantly led by scientists and researchers.

They may sound like a trustworthy group of messengers, but actually the public have fairly low trust in science, fuelled by the fact that scientists often don’t communicate in an accessible manner for a generalist audience

This has all led to an overall lack of understanding on the topic of climate change, and a lack of action to drive change.

As part of the ‘Think first, buy second’ campaign, Vestiaire Collective have produced a 5 step framework to define what ‘fast fashion’ actually is.

This is great because it both increases understanding about a climate-related topic, and gives consumers a practical guide for taking action — a useful checklist that they can use when evaluating a brand to buy from.

And, to top it off, Vestiaire Collective also worked with ‘an international committee of activists and fashion sustainability experts’ to answer the question.

These are trusted messengers.

They’re the researchers who really understand sustainability in fashion. And they’re the sustainable fashion influencers that consumers know and trust from their social media timelines.

They’re tagged on the educational Instagram post to add that trust to Vestiaire Collective’s communications:

And they’re amplifying and reinforcing the message through their own channels too:

Whilst in the comments of Vestiaire Collective’s posts other trusted messengers are showing their support — sustainability influencers like Brett Staniland, Venetia La Manna, and Isaias Hernandez who have all been incredibly vocal to their audiences about greenwashing by fast fashion brands.

In working with, and gaining the respect of, these trusted messengers, the trust that their audience have in them gets transferred to Vestiaire Collective.

Which is a superb brand building exercise for them. I, for one, clicked that ‘follow’ button immediately — and I doubt I’m the only one.

This blog was first published on my Medium profile.

Make My Money Matter is a campaigning organisation working to shift our financial system away from profiting off fossil fuels and towards investments that build a socially and environmentally just future.

The latest Make My Money Matter campaign focuses on pensions.

The video at the centre of the campaign features Olivia Colman as ‘Oblivia Coalmine’, a power-hungry oil executive who thanks us all for continuing to fund their sky-high profits via our pension providers’ investments in the fossil fuel industry.

So, does the Oblivia Coalmine campaign work well as a piece of climate change communication?

Let’s take a look.

The pros

There are several reasons that the Oblivia Coalmine campaign is a great example of climate change communication – let’s take a look.

Using a trusted messenger

The use of Olivia Colman as a trusted messenger makes the Oblivia Coalmine campaign a strong example of climate communication.

Historically, there has been very little trust involved in communicating climate change. From fossil fuel companies fuelling denial to politicians placing blame on individual citizens to climate scientists whose scientific jargon is hard to decipher, the voices producing most of the messages on climate change have been some of the least trusted — making it less likely that audiences will believe and act on the messages they hear.

Using a household name like Olivia Colman to spread a climate-focused message means it’s likely to go further and reach audiences that might not usually engage with climate communications.

“I hope everyone who sees this ad realises the shocking — but unintended — impacts of our pensions and makes their money matter. It really is one of the most powerful things we can all do to protect the planet.” — Olivia Colman

This is evident in the extensive press reaction to Oblivia Coalmine, with the campaign winning coverage in traditional media outlets like the Telegraph and Independent, as well as reaching pensions-specific media outlets like Pensions Age, sustainability-focused media like Sustainability Beat, and even the climate deniers over at right wing media GB news.

It helps also that Make My Money Matter was founded by well-known film director Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral to name but a few), adding a second household name into the mix.

This use of well-known names to increase the impact of climate change messages has started to gain traction, a great example being the ‘Climate Science Translated’ video series by Climate Science Breakthrough which features comedians like Nish Kumar and Jo Brand explaining important concepts in climate science in a fun and accessible way.

But, other than Olivia Colman’s involvement, what else makes the Oblivia Coalmine video effective as a climate comms piece?

A simple message and one that outrages

Pensions and how financial instutions invest and profit of them is a pretty complex topic to get into.

But, the campaign keeps the message simple and memorable for a general audience, not being tempted to go into depth on the ins and outs of how pensions and investments work, but instead focusing on the injustice of our hard-earned pensions being used for no good.

Creative use of satire

The campain uses satire as its core lever, poking fun at the greasy executives of the corporate world to bring light to a very real issue.

In doing something different to the norm of both sustainability marketing campaigns and the greenwashing campaigns of the fossil fuel industry, it stands out in a good way.

Putting the blame back on those profitting from climate change

Too much of the climate change narrative has been commandeered by the fossil fuel industry.

The video effectively exposes the oil and gas industry’s greenwashing marketing techniques through its script to emphasise the point that it is those extracting and burning fossil fuels for profit who are to blame and who are continuing to find shady ways to continue filling their pockets (like benefitting from our pension funds).

My personal favourite script line is: “We’ve even managed to build a few little wind turbines to keep Greta and her chums happy.”

The cons

Whilst there are undoubtedly many successes to point out in the Oblivia Coalmine campaign by Make My Money Matter, there are also two big downsides that are worth highlighting alongside them:

• It’s yet another ‘doom and gloom’ climate narrative
• The campaign was produced by Lucky General creative agency, who have worked with some *questionable* brands previously.

Doom and gloom climate narratives

Climate communications often centre around a narrative of loss and despair. We’re all used to seeing images of extreme weather disasters or polar bears clinging onto icebergs, with language of battles, fights, and emergencies.

Think of the WWF’s tendency for a ‘once it’s gone it’s gone’ message on wildlife conservation – like their #lastselfie or love it or lose it campaigns — for example.

That’s all true and factual and important.

But, it isn’t always conducive to action.

Fear and hopelessness can be motivating, but only if there is room for the audience to act and solve the problem. But most climate change comms doesn’t leave room for solutions, for what the alternative could look like.

As Krosnick et al put it in their ‘A Study of Popular Concern about Global Warming’:

“People stop paying attention to global climate change when they realise there is no easy solution for it.”

We need to see climate change communications that move beyond that doom and gloom narrative and which also paint a picture of what a brighter future could look like if we manage to minimise climate change — the pull factors that inspire and motivate audiences to act.

So, in this instance, what if our pensions were no longer invested in fossil fuels? What could that mean for society?

The problem of climate change campaigns by advertising agencies

Make My Money Matter partnered with a creative agency to produce the Oblivia Coalmine campaign.

That isn’t necessarily a problem in itself.

But, creative agencies work with many brands.

And as the Clean Creatives campaign shows us, it’s common for creative agencies to work on oil and gas campaigns — or with other brands that are actively doing harm to the environment.

And this is true in this case.

Make My Money Matter worked with Lucky General.

They’re by no means the worst offender in the advertising agency world — you won’t see them on this year’s Clean Creatives F-list — but they certainly have profitted from some campaigns that are highly questionable in terms of both environmental and social impact, like:

• Virgin Atlantic: airlines are almost as bad as oil and gas when it comes to greenwashing
• Princes Tuna: we all know from Seaspiracy that there’s no such thing as sustainable fishing, and tuna is one of the worst offenders for killing dolphins and other marine species
• Amazon: no words are needed to explain why they’re a bad guy
• Betfair Gambling: there’s no such thing as fair gambling.

And that’s to name but a few.

So, there are certainly improvements to make.

But, regardless, it’s pleasing to see climate change communications campaigns hitting the headlines and see celebrities backing important campaigns — so perhaps, in this case, the pros outweigh the cons.