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In a world first, covered today in the Independent and DeSmog, Adfree Cities and the New Weather Institute have reported ad giant WPP to the international corporate watchdog, the OECD over its work for major polluters.
The groundbreaking complaint, written by barristers at Doughty Street Chambers, alleges that WPP has breached rules on climate and human rights through its advertising work. It marks a “step-change” in legal risk for advertisers working with polluter clients, especially fossil fuel companies.
➡️ Find out more at www.badverts.org/wpp
Behind every billboard promoting ever larger SUVs, long distance airlines and fossil fuel companies, is an ad agency. Our complaint shines a light on the often hidden role of the advertising industry in promoting climate breakdown and its impacts on our health, nature and human rights.
Cities round the UK, including Edinburgh and Sheffield, have called time on high-carbon advertising on their advertising estates. UN Secretary General António Guterres has called for a global fossil fuel advertising ban, warning that fossil fuel companies are “aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men fuelling the madness“. The British Medical Journal recently excluded adverts for fossil fuel companies and banks that finance them. The reputational and legal risks of fossil fuel advertising are growing.
Promoting Polluters
WPP is the largest ad firm in the world. It also has more fossil fuel contracts than any other ad company (79 contracts in 2024), and lengthy relationships with carmakers, massive plastics producers, airlines with disastrous expansion plans, and fossil fuel financiers.
We allege that WPP’s advertising work for major polluters, like Shell, BP, Equinor, British Airways, Toyota, Ford, CocaCola, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and more, is directly facilitating increased demand for polluting products and undermining global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The OECD has government backed recommendations to multinational enterprises on how to do business sustainably and responsibly. The complaint alleges that WPP has breached those recommendations, the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, on numerous counts.
Veronica Wignall, co-director at Adfree Cities, said: “It’s been said that advertisers are the architects of desire. I look around and see ads everywhere for SUVs, plastic polluter giants and long distance flights, in between newsreels of climate disasters and nature loss. It is now both morally unforgivable and a legal risk to do promotional work for toxic brands like Shell and Coke. WPP is currently working against the greener, fairer future the world urgently needs; we’re calling on WPP to live up to its climate pledges and stop promoting polluters.”
Harj Narulla, Barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who co-wrote the complaint, said: “This complaint to the OECD NCP marks a step-change in legal risk for advertisers working to facilitate fossil fuel companies and other major polluters. Our complaint clearly shows that by representing high emitting clients, WPP is in breach of its human rights, climate and environmental duties under the OECD Guidelines. WPP must disengage from these clients and start meeting its due diligence and disclosure obligations.”
Breaking the power to influence
“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men fuelling the madness,”
~ UN Secretary-General António Guterres, June 2024
More than 1000 advertising agencies worldwide have pledged to stop working with fossil fuel clients. We’re asking WPP to stop promoting polluters, and to report their ‘advertised emissions’ – the emissions facilitated by their work. In 2022, work by industry group Purpose Disruptors found that the advertised emissions of the UK ad industry were equivalent to adding 32% to the carbon emissions of every citizen.
Advertisers have huge power to shape the future of our world. They can influence us to consume more plastic and massive cars, to trust lying fossil fuel companies to lead an energy transition, to greenwash the banks that finance them, to buy newer tech without considering its human rights and waste implications. Or, companies like WPP could refuse to work with clients that have repeatedly shown their disregard for the climate and human rights.
Advertising professionals have expressed deep disquiet over working for high-emitting companies. In a survey of 30 senior ad professionals, many acknowledged that they had tried to steer their firms away from working with polluting clients, especially oil and gas companies. One participant in the survey by CASP commented: “We are complicit in the advertising industry… we are complicit in the delay [to Net Zero]. We target politicians and financial decision makers to make them think that fossil fuel clients are part of the solution – like, that’s in the briefs.”
WPP has legal responsibilities to protect the climate, nature and human rights from the impacts of its work. We have asked the OECD’s UK National Contact Point to consider the breaches we’ve outlined in our complaint, to hold WPP accountable for the adverse impacts of its operations and to require the firm to take steps to bring its practices into compliance with the OECD Guidelines.
For more information about our complaint, go to www.badverts.org/WPP. For any further information, or to get involved in our work towards Adfree Cities, get in touch: hello@adfreecities.org.uk and sign up to our newsletter to stay in the loop.
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