EPISODE 7 - CLIMATE DENIAL - TRANSCRIPT

Sonoo Singh - Founder, Creative Salon

John Grant – Author, The Greener Market

Richard Black – Director, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

Harriet Kingaby - Co-Founder, The Conscious Advertising Network

Sonoo:  Hello and welcome to the Conscious Thinking Podcast from The Conscious Advertising Network, this is the next in the series of though provoking sessions where today we’re discussing Climate Denial.

I am your host Sonoo Singh from The Creative Salon and with me I have John Grant, the author of The Greener Market, sequel to the best-selling Green Marketing Manifesto; Richard Black, former Northern Ireland Correspondent at the BBC and now director Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, and also the Conscious Advertising Network Co-Founder Harriet Kingaby. 

Welcome everyone) thank you for being here.

Harriet can I start with you.  Now marketers don’t ever have a choice but to stay in tune with all the emerging trends etc and what the consumer perceptions are, now war on plastic, if you remember, was quite important especially in the last two years, particularly after the excellent Blue Planet, and already we can see brands like McDonalds, and a lot of retailers working to make similar strides, I mean that’s one very small area that we are talking about, do you think that the marketing industry is doing enough when it comes to climate change?

Harriet:  Well I think that there’s always more that we can do, I think for me there is a really important piece of work coming out of the industry at the moment, for the Ad Association, and we’ll deal with that in another podcast, that looks at the sustainability of the industry in general, I think it’s really important for us as an industry to wake up and look at that, but what I’m really concerned with this year as well is the issue of misinformation and disinformation online.  And we’ve seen this year we’ve had some seismic societal events and what has been extremely worrying is that there are actors online who seek to exploit information around those events, target people and spread disinformation and that can take many different forms.  It can take the form of conspiracy theories that pray on the fact that people are feeling scared and worried, it might be in the climate context, greenwashing, though we’ve seen less of that this year, greenwashing where organisations are trying to suggest that they are a lot more green than actually they really are, or it might take the form of kind of cultural narratives, where we pit people against each other, and all of these I’m really concerned about this year and I think that it’s really important that the advertising industry is aware of them, what they look like, and starts to create strategies online that might help either by stopping these things being funded by us or to tackle them from the narrative perspective.  So I think there’s always more we can do, and for me I want the industry to be thinking about everything it’s doing but also the attacks it might see. 

Sonoo:  That’s interesting.  Richard from your point of view, I’m interested as to how do you look at the advertising industry, because it has obviously a very conspicuous role in capitalism as such, so can the pace be fast enough, actually deep enough for businesses really to make any changes.  And I was talking to my 14 year old last night and he was reminding me of the unnecessary packaging looking at all the online shopping that we’d been doing during lockdown, I mean how did we even let this happen for so long, do you think, we’ll even be having that conversation say in ten years time or even less for that matter?

Richard:  Yes I think it’s interesting because marketers in advertising are by definition engaged by clients so what difference can advertisers and marketers make? On the one hand you could have a situation where the industry as a whole just goes to a fairly radical position in saying we are simply not going to advertise high carbon stuff and we’re not going to engage with any client that promotes misinformation, but that might not be a very easy thing to do and there will probably always be some people that will always do that.  I think when you take on clients insisting that what goes out there is factual is clearly one thing, that’s not terribly difficult to do I don’t think in this particular arena.  Where adverts are placed is an interesting one because as we know there’s a movement out there for example Stop Funding Hate and now Stop Funding Heat for climate change, so are you, is your client’s money, supporting those publications and so on, that promote misinformation?  And then how do you use your creative power, because advertising is more than about simply trying to sell products, it creates images, it creates means and so on, so how can you use your creativity to actually change things?

Sonoo:  That’s interesting.  John your book ultimately is about this isn’t it, to kind of go beyond marketing that simply looks good, but marketing that does good.  Are there any kind of tips for marketeers that you have in the book, which actually talks about how do you not just sell your products but also improve human life in the kind of times that we live in?

John:   Yeah I think the context is really encouraging, there’s a whole section in the book for instance called Fifty Shades of Greenwash, which is a joke because there’s only about thirteen but I’m exaggerating, and there are some problematic areas of advertising marketing, so I’ll come back and talk about oil companies in a second and their marketing, but in general I would say compared to when I wrote my previous book in 2007, then greenwash was absolutely rife and a lot of it was unknowing, like making a claim without supporting it with a fact or exaggerating a claim, and I think that our industry has grown up to this issue and it is more up with it, and I think generally signs are really encouraging.  Globally 85% of people are concerned or very concerned about climate change whatever misinfo or disinfo is out there that’s particularly prominent like in the States you’re very likely to be concerned about it if you live anywhere near a coast, within 70 miles, because you’ve seen fires and floods and other events which make it rather difficult to listen to the Ancram Fox News or your President telling you that it’s all a conspiracy.  There are still some difficult areas, so one of the oldest cases of greenwash was actually Chevron, who produced a campaign talking about their butterfly farms, bear sanctuaries and so forth, which were very small projects funded by an oil company.  So in the bay where they spent $500 on the butterfly sanctuary they were also responsible for a major oil spill and it’s the question, as Harriet said, about proportionality and what you present, but that campaign by Chevron actually won an Effie Award in the industry because they prove that it was incredibly effective to associate an oil company with images of nature and themes of conservation. And that goes on.   

Sonoo:  So Richard, from your lens I would like to understand what do you think, in terms of how the advertising industry can have some sort of impactful change.  Just imagine what all of us have been doing in the last few months here in lockdown is obviously a lot of online shopping and just looking at all the unnecessary packing that arrives, I mean would we at any time be having a discussion which even talks about how did we let this happen for so long. 

Richard:  It’s interesting to think about what action the industry could take on different scales really, I mean at the most extreme could you have an industry where all or most of the players refused to touch accounts of high carbon companies?  In the same way that currently for example arms manufacturers and tobacco companies, a large chunk of the industry won’t touch them, could we get to the stage where that is the case with oil companies and with car companies that spew stuff out of its tailpipe and with airlines?  It’s an interesting vision, and maybe in ten years of so we might be there, but we’re clearly not there now.  I think there is a role however definitely at the moment in trying to make sure that the kind of claims that companies make are based in fact, are based in ALL of the fact, and there are situations here that concern climate science and probably more situations that concern the energy transition as well.    And then I think that the third aspect of this really is that the advertising industry is a font of creativity, it creates storylines, it creates narratives, it creates imagery, so it’s the way that those are used and how they engage people in the clean energy transition, and in getting concerned about the reality of the world around them.   

Sonoo:  That’s an interesting concept because John I imagine that in your book you’re not really talking about brands, or businesses indeed, that sell tobacco or arms etc.  But if, as a business, if you need to talk about climate crisis, bio diversity, social justice, single use plastics and all of that, at a time of this global economic crisis are these not far too many battles for brands to be fighting?

John:  Well there are occasions when you need to talk about them, and it can be really helpful with things like behaviour change and helping people do their bit, but broadly very encouragingly most of the leading organisations in the world have set really stringent targets.  You’ve seen lots of announcements of net zero, Ikea says it’s people and planet positive, and Starbucks, you know really mainstream brands have said they are going to be resource positive, so they have decided that there is a race, that they are in it, there is going to be a future green economy and they are going to compete for a piece of that.  So you see large traditional marketing organisations, let’s pick for example Nestlé a very large food and pharmaceutical company, which for commercial and sustainability reasons, is divesting of brands like as Herta cooked meats because that is not a high growth, high attraction, high aspiration segment for them, and it’s also not going to be driving their sustainability targets either, and they are buying brands in.  Like they bought a company called the Awesome Burger which is a competitor of Impossible and is a plant based meat, and these trends have reached the point, and I’ve been really encouraged by all of the Green Recovery Alliance pronouncements and so forth, that actually in 2008 we did have a bit of a hiatus, a bit of a crash in engagement with sustainability as companies did focus on the fact that they were in a boat and there seemed to be a hole below the line and they needed to just right their finances.  And what the European Alliance for the Green Recovery has said is that there’s a fire in our house called climate change, biodiversity and so forth, and there are also issues around social justice, there’s now another fire in our building called pandemic economic impact, and we’re going to have to fight all these fires at once, we can’t afford to wait ten years to sort the economy out to sort this other stuff out.  But if you are going to compete for the green future, and I know Richard you are a fan of this, there are really positive solutions and messages like plant based foods, and there are equivalents happening in fashion, food, regenerative farming is a huge climate solution and really big players, now it used to be the Patagonia’s of this world and the Dr Bronner’s who were behind regenerative farming, now Walmart announced this year that they are going to be a regenerative company.   

And it sort of starts with the facts, so when Starbucks looks at its entire carbon footprint, says ok our CEO has announced that we are going to be resource neutral, what does that mean?   

Then if you look at your impact, for instance on carbon, about a fifth of all of Starbucks’ impact is about dairy and actually waste and plastics and those sorts of things, even coffee and agriculture distribution are all smaller factors, there’s nothing even half as big as their impact on dairy.  So that gives them a focus and then what the marketers can do is go ‘ok non-dairy milks are quite cool’ so one thing they’ve done is made a partnership with Oatly, which doubled the number of Oatly outlets in the States, and go well non-dairy milk is clearly going to be the growth area, next year I imagine they might go into persuading people to drink black coffee or smaller servings of milk, but they know what they are working with because they’ve set an external target which is, as people like to say these days, science-based.

And the other huge factor in this is employee and shareholder pressure, those two things together, so Amazon seem to come to the table quite late on all of this, after an internal action group from employees, and companies like Blackrock are busy going to shareholder meetings demanding that companies right the ship on issues like decarbonisation and really show how they are setting science-based targets because they think it’s for investors holding long-term positions in companies, they don’t want to see this level of climate risk on their books.  And similarly Proctor & Gamble, another prominent marketing company, a couple of few weeks ago had a shareholder revolt over their pace of change on deforestation, and both with their sourcing of palm oil and sourcing of timber for toilet rolls, and so the shareholders voted by a majority that they had to come back with a better plan.  Those are the kind of pressures on companies that, as I said, most of the clients that I meet are going we’re in this race, there’s no climate change denial debate here, we are trying to work out how we can compete for this future green and just economy and then you can start marketing in a positive way, because you know, what’s your Brompton bike? what’s the product we’re going to bring to market that’s a game changer for your industry?   

Sonoo:  Richard, from your point of view it seems that all the big businesses, the mammoth organisations, they all seem to be doing something that’s linked to climate change, but some of the examples that John even mentioned they are some bewildering examples, and as a former ‘Beeb’ (BBC) journalist you’ve criticised the Beeb itself for its own coverage of energy as well and how it needs to change the lens through which it looks at the climate crisis, I just wonder do we need to take some kind of responsibility on the kind of narrative that we are stitching together to make some kind of language that is easier, not just for the businesses and the corporate structures but for people to understand and therefore be able to counteract the misinformation that sits on all the digital platforms. 

Richard:  Yes I think that there are a couple of things there, one is the stuff that’s easy to understand so the facts and the evidence is actually graspable, because frankly a lot of it is really arcane and couched in percentages and parts/million and all this kind of stuff.  And the second is ‘what’s the story here’?  What is the story about how life is going to change and we can see that some of the opponents of climate action have been very good, very skilful at putting a scare story out there, that ‘oh the country won’t be able to afford a clean energy transition’ and ‘if we switch to renewables the lights will go out and we’re going to become poor’ and ‘anyway it doesn’t matter because China’s not doing anything’. 

They are very skilful about putting out that.  I often return to the framing that was developed by an organisation called Mission 2020, which was set up by Christiana Figueres former head of the UN climate convention, and their sort of watchword was that the clean energy transition is necessary, desirable and feasible, and necessary because of climate change, desirable because it brings many other benefits like cleaner air, and actually ultimately lower energy bills and so on and so forth.  And feasible because actually we have the vast majority of the tools to get there.  And I think if you look at the most damaging attacks that have been mounted by climate contrarians, it is actually on the feasibility part of it, it’s the ‘we can’t do it’ and actually that I think is the bit where there is a real opportunity there to engage people and give them agency -‘yes you can do this’, for example over the next twenty years the next time you change your gas boiler switching to heat pump system or something like this.  And you can get involved in the democratic process, because why not you’re a citizen and your purchasing choices can make a difference and so on and so forth.  Because if you’re thinking about climate impact, generally that’s a worrying thing, that’s something else to worry with, but actually the clean energy transition is forward looking, it’s optimistic, it’s engaging and people can actually do something.

Sonoo: Harriet can I ask you in terms of the misinformation study that you did, and from what Richard just said, did it actually throw up anything in terms of the lack of understanding that the businesses have?

Harriet: Totally, and I completely agree with everything that Richard and John have just said, but I think we also need to put this into context of the environments where people receive this information.  So for example on Facebook we found examples of groups that are using Facebook ad tools to test and learn what works in terms of climate denial.   And we found examples of people creating, or layering conspiracy theories with climate denial because conspiracy theories create frames that are useful to climate misinformation, they degrade trust in science or multilateral agreements, we’ve even seen a multilateral agreement derailed by misinformation.  So the global compact of migration was derailed causing lots of people to pull out and the collapse of the Belgium government because of a co-ordinated series of attacks.  I think we’ve also got to make sure that we are making sure that our media spend does goes to sites which are showing quality reporting around this and I think we have a job to do.  I think one half of our strategy for 2020 has got to be around, yes how we persuade, how we create great marketing that promotes products that are going to solve the problem, and I also think that we need adversarial strategies this year.  I think we need to understand misinformation, where it comes from and be able to counter it.  And if that’s conspiracy theories it might be helping people out of those, it might be creating paid media strategies that meet climate deniers where they are and take them to credible information.  It might be as simple as saying to your boss ‘No I’m not working on that brief’, ‘I’m not going to place a load of adverts that spread this kind of misinformation’, ‘I’m not going to work on these high carbon clients’.

But I think that we all need adversarial strategies, both personally and in terms of our clients as well because we’re going to need to tackle this stuff head on’.

Sonoo:  Indeed, well that’s been hugely fascinating and always life affirming to end on a positive note as well, thank you.

A huge thank you to our guests, John Grant, Harriet Kingaby and Richard Black.  And also a big thank you to our friends Marshall Street Editors and The Nerve.

Thank you for listening and bye bye.