Did you know that Oil and Gas fat cats are spending disproportionate amounts of money on marketing their ‘green solutions’ compared to actually investing in them?
As the Climate Crisis becomes more urgent, we’re seeing more and more ‘Greenwashing’ from dirty businesses trying to clean-up their public image. So much so that in the UK, the
number of adverts banned for making false green claims tripled and globally 40% of firm’s green claims could be misleading.
Last year, we teamed up with Waterbear Studios to help demystify the ‘Greenwash Phenomenon’ using Hamsters (Yes, you read that right).
Identifying and calling out greenwash can be really tricky, especially since it’s been cooked up in a cauldron by PR fat cats to be deliberately invisible, so we decided that using humor would help trigger engagement and retention in the audience.
The film shows three humorous examples of Hamster businesses engaging in greenwashing tactics and then provides the audience with tools to call-out greenwashing businesses when they spot it in their everyday lives.
But how does humor help drive towards action? Neuroscientists think that it helps activate the brain’s dopamine reward system, which in turn boosts motivation and long-term memory. Furthermore, a report in 1990 found that cartoons designed to deliver complex statistics helped reduce anxiety and improve learning (Schacdt and Stewart).
So, when Glimpse and Clean Creatives approached us to respond to the Oil and Gas industries’ new greenwashing tactics, we deployed humor again…
To tackle their perception of being ‘the bad guys’, companies like Shell and BP are paying some of the UK’s top influencers to peddle their dodgy ‘green innovations’. The brilliant folks at DeSmog have found over 100 creator’s greenwashing on behalf of supermajors including Presenter Alisha Dixon, YouTuber Colin Furze and BBC Presenter / Explorer Robert Swan OBE.
But how influential is this content? Well, people with lots of big wrinkles in their brains at Harvard University say that peddling ‘green innovation’ narratives is one of the key social media tactics deployed by fossil fuel companies with some of these posts reaching over 1 billion people.
We worked with the hilarious Will Hislop to develop a script which parodied the ‘Margot Robbie in the bathtub’ scene from ‘The Big Short’ to explain how influencers are accepting money from these companies to bring ‘authenticity’ to their ‘green claims’.
The film received over 100,000 interactions across socials and was featured in ‘The Drum’. The film received overwhelming praise from influencers and activists such as Mikaela Loach, Aja Barber and Dani Reyes-Acosta, who said, ‘This is some of the BEST content I’ve seen in a long, long time’.
If you spot greenwash out in the wild, the UK has set up the Green Claims Code to report and call out instances of greenwash. Check it out here: https://greenclaims.campaign.gov.uk/
