Why Every Crisis Makes Marketing Worse
The advertising industry's climate awakening is just the latest performance in marketing's endless theater of moral positioning
The Ad Industry’s Climate Pivot Shows How Fear Drives Conformity, Not Creativity
The advertising industry’s response to climate concerns, as reported in the Financial Times, follows a predictable script: genuine issue emerges, industry panics, everyone adopts identical positions, nothing meaningful changes. The same agencies that sold cigarettes as freedom and SUVs as safety are now selling themselves as climate warriors. The pivot isn’t about the planet. It’s about survival through conformity.
This pattern – crisis, conference, consensus, conformity – has become the industry’s default response to every challenge. Whether it’s digital transformation, brand purpose, or now climate action, the result is always the same: every agency saying the same things, making the same promises, producing the same work.
The Conference Industrial Complex
Ad Net Zero’s latest gathering had all the hallmarks of advertising’s performative problem-solving. Executives from Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, and Havas made sweeping declarations about climate action. Clean Creatives announced it had recruited than 1,000 industry members. The message was clear: advertising is taking climate seriously.
But data tells a different story. Despite these pledges, advertising spend for fossil fuel companies grew 9% last year according to MediaRadar. Automotive advertising, dominated by SUV promotions, increased 14%. Private jet marketing doubled. The same agencies pledging net zero are helping companies sell products that make net zero impossible.
Research from the University of Cambridge found that “green” advertising campaigns actually increase overall consumption by 23% by making consumers feel better about buying more. The advertising industry isn’t solving climate problems – it’s creating a psychological framework where overconsumption feels virtuous.
The IPA’s effectiveness database shows that purpose-driven campaigns underperform sales-focused campaigns by 40% in driving business results. Yet agencies continue pushing purpose because it wins awards and attracts talent, not because it works. Climate has become the latest purpose platform for an industry that monetizes moral positions.
The Talent Retention Theater
Havas’s research showing employees care about climate action has been weaponized to justify the industry’s green pivot. But this misses a crucial point: young talent isn’t leaving advertising because agencies work with oil companies. They’re leaving because the work is increasingly meaningless, regardless of the client.
LinkedIn data shows advertising industry turnover reached 33% last year, the highest in a decade. Exit interviews consistently cite “lack of creative fulfillment” and “too much process” as primary reasons for leaving. Climate commitments don’t address these fundamental issues – they’re a distraction from them.
The industry’s response to talent concerns always involves adding more processes, committees, and initiatives rather than addressing the core problem: advertising has become boring. Climate committees, diversity councils, and purpose workshops multiply while the actual work becomes increasingly homogeneous.
The Client Capture Dynamic
WPP’s promise to “educate” clients about climate reveals the industry’s delusion about power dynamics. Agencies don’t educate clients; they rationalize client decisions. When a car company wants to promote SUVs, agencies don’t suggest smaller vehicles – they find ways to make SUVs seem environmental.
This client capture is structural. The big holding companies derive 60% of revenue from their top 20 clients according to their annual reports. Losing one major client can trigger layoffs, stock declines, and leadership changes. In this context, “education” means finding creative ways to make whatever clients want seem climatefriendly.
The University of Pennsylvania’s research on agency-client relationships found that agencies change their stated values to match client positions 78% of the time, not the reverse. The climate pivot isn’t changing what agencies do – it’s changing how they describe what they’ve always done.
Why Crises Make Advertising Worse
Every crisis follows the same pattern. First, genuine concern emerges. Then, conferences proliferate. Next, everyone adopts identical positions to avoid standing out. Finally, the industry produces work that’s safe, similar, and ineffective.
We saw this with digital transformation, where every agency became “digital-first” while producing the same TV commercials. We saw it with purpose, where every brand discovered a social mission while selling the same products. Now we’re seeing it with climate, where every agency is green while the work remains unchanged.
The irony is that advertising is most effective when it’s distinctive, yet crisis drives conformity. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that distinctive brands grow 2.5x faster than category-generic brands. But distinction requires risk, and crisis makes everyone risk-averse.
The Alternative Nobody Will Take
Real climate action in advertising would mean refusing high-carbon categories entirely. No SUV ads. No airline promotions. No cruise marketing. But this would cut industry revenue by an estimated 35% according to GroupM data. No agency will voluntarily shrink by a third.
Instead, we get carbon offsets for production shoots, sustainable catering at commercial filming, and pledges to achieve net zero by 2050. These are genuinely positive steps that have negligible impact on the industry’s actual carbon footprint, which comes from the consumption driven by the advertising itself.
The honest position would be admitting that advertising’s job is to drive consumption, and consumption drives emissions. But honesty doesn’t win clients, attract talent, or generate positive press coverage. So the industry will continue its climate pivot, adding more committees and commitments while changing nothing fundamental about what it does.