The Scene
PR shops that specialize in climate have more work than ever — but it’s also getting a lot harder.
At Climate Week NYC last month, the conference rooms, bars, and hotel lobbies of midtown Manhattan were filled with climate-focused corporate executives, political leaders, and the journalists chasing after them. But in between them all were countless third-party communications consultants — many more than I’ve seen in previous Climate Weeks — working overtime to get their clients into the right meetings and onto — or out of — the front pages of the global press. Companies are touting climate solutions, jostling for a seat at the table for important policy decisions, and trying to respond to or, better yet, avoid controversies. There are also more journalists on the climate beat. PR firms are an inevitable link between those trends. For those who focus on sustainability, these days they’re both busier than ever and having to manage a much more technically complicated — and potentially fraught — docket: Climate action, once an afterthought in corporate comms, is now an indispensable element of corporate public messaging.
“Huge brands are rewiring their communications strategy to weave in a climate story that advances broader market leadership — and that’s when they could be talking about their product or simply keeping quiet,” said Matt Stewart, West Coast general manager for Method Communications. “Many corporations talked about climate somewhere before, but today it’s much more pervasive.”
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Tim’s view
Journalists rely on comms firms perhaps more than we would like to admit, as the gatekeepers to newsmaking corporate executives. But in climate, as in other fields, there’s a natural conflict between journalists’ core interest — breaking accurate news — and the comms folks’, which is to serve clients. That conflict can easily lead down the slippery slope to greenwashing if journalists are inattentive. That dynamic is nothing new, and hasn’t changed; greenwashing still happens every day. But I find that compared to a few years ago, there are not only more comms consultants working in climate, but they’re getting more specialized and sophisticated on the issues, and more willing to push back against initiatives that aren’t scientifically up to snuff — in the interest of protecting their and their clients’ reputations, if nothing else.
Before Climate Week, PR firms deluged my inbox with interview offers with executives of leading companies across the global economy, an indication of how significant the event has become on the sustainability marketing calendar. During interviews, most of the comms folks I interacted with sat quietly on the side, listening attentively and taking studious notes, occasionally asking their own questions. I never felt pressured to swallow dubious facts — not to say I didn’t hear a few — or to avoid sensitive or confrontational questions.
When I followed up with half a dozen climate comms officers this week — most couldn’t speak on the record; they prefer to deflect the spotlight — what many said is that the nature of their jobs has changed.
“When we were working with companies on this five years ago or so, the key question they had was, should we act?” said Deb Greenspan, a partner at FGS Global who co-leads the firm’s energy and sustainability team. “Now the big question is a much harder one, which is how are we gonna decarbonize the global economy? And that’s a very different communications challenge.”
Rather than helping companies toot their horn about whatever harebrained climate scheme they come up with, many climate comms consultants see their job as helping companies spot and avoid greenwashing pitfalls. That means doing more homework than they do for other clients, they said, including seeking out third-party validation of decarbonization strategies or product data, and working with lawyers to make sure marketing language doesn’t run afoul of the proliferating legal restrictions on corporate green claims.
Pressure is on from the press, too; the climate beat has somewhat bucked the newsroom layoff trends of the recent past, with a proliferation of climate beat reporters and new climate-focused publications such as this newsletter. Counterintuitively, having more reporters around makes selling corporate climate stories harder, not easier, comms folks told me: They have better-tuned radar for dubious engineering or business models, and a higher bar for what they consider novel or interesting. That means having to manage down companies’ expectations for laudatory coverage of climate solutions, one executive at a large firm told me: “Even if you’re doing something you think is pretty unique, the reality is, you’re not the only company doing that.”
The elephant in the room is the fossil fuel industry, which poses a particularly acute risk of greenwashing. Many large PR firms — Ogilvy, Edelman, FTI, and McCann, among others — maintain oil and gas companies, or their lobbying groups, as clients. Consultants I spoke to were divided about the ethics of representing Big Oil. Some said they’ve requested not to work with them personally, and generally found that request to be respected by their employers. Others were comfortable helping promote what they saw as genuine decarbonization innovations by those companies.
“I don’t think I would subscribe to ‘don’t work with the fossil fuel industry’ as a mantra for the creative industry as a whole,” one sustainability-focused comms officer from a large firm said. “But I think where you have to be careful is if you get into a relationship with those industries and all of a sudden you’re being asked to push stories that fall into the greenwashing bucket. Are you in a position where you can get out of that? Because it can become hard to say no.”
Room for Disagreement
A growing number of comms and marketing firms are tracking their “advertised emissions” and committing to cut ties with fossil fuel clients; more than 1,000 agencies globally have signed a “clean creatives” pledge committing to avoid future fossil fuel contracts.