If you’re an employee at a company that has climate goals, doing marketing or PR work for a fossil fuel client could cancel out your company’s emissions reductions progress—and attract backlash from clients that expected your company to adhere to its sustainable standards. For example, advertising work that generates a sales increase of just 0.2 percent for a fossil fuel client can “immediately wipe out the impact of [your agency’s] net zero plan.” Further, advertisers and customers are increasingly looking for climate content and products: advertisers are making more requests for climate-related coverage; and Gen Z and Millennial consumers are talking and doing more than other generations to engage with climate action on social media and through personal actions.
Marketing
If you’re a marketer, you’re a storyteller—and stories are powerful tools for creating change. By crafting effective campaigns, you can convey the urgency of the climate crisis and move people to action. In your role, you also likely make important decisions around partnerships, which means you can help ensure your business doesn’t promote or work with bad actors (read: fossil fuel and other environment-destroying companies).
Have you used this or any of our Job Function Action Guides to make your job a climate job? If so, we want to hear about it! We encourage you to share your story with us by completing this form.
The Business Case
To make your marketing job a climate job:
Talking climate within your organization
- Understand where your company and marketing team stand on climate action and start normalizing the climate conversation. By crafting a new narrative within your own company and team, you can more easily do the same for your customers and clients.
Engaging customers
- Use your consumer and community ties for climate-related education and action campaigns. (Check out Seventh Generation’s work on climate justice for inspiration.)
- Find creative ways to nudge consumers to take their own climate action. (Check out this great example from LL Bean and Netflix’s Don’t Look Up action campaign.)
- If you work in e-commerce, explore opportunities to seamlessly enable consumers to contribute to climate solutions via direct-to-consumer payment processing. (For example, give customers the option to donate to a climate organization at check-out.)
- Collaborate with and learn from other brands leading on climate to scale the impact of campaigns.
- Work with the sustainability team to include carbon labeling on products to help customers make more informed and sustainable consumption decisions. (Check out Allbirds’ free tools on carbon transparency!)
Production
- If you work in production, make sure your marketing campaigns and events are low-carbon and circular (e.g., minimize flights, which can often comprise the majority of production emissions; avoid buying new; and source energy from renewables).
Marketing campaigns
- Use climate-friendly imagery and characters in your advertising (e.g., bikes, mass transit, plant-based meals, etc.).
- If you’re on the agency side, avoid working with fossil fuel companies and other businesses that prop up the fossil fuel industry—and include climate considerations in your client proposals.
- If you’re on the client side, choose creative agencies that have robust zero-waste and zero-carbon initiatives, and ask all agencies what they’re doing on sustainability and climate.
- Work with your team and leadership to develop a playbook and implement policy to prevent greenwashing.
- Consider the emissions associated with your advertising and media plans. Different channels have different impacts, therefore measurement and reduction strategies should be evaluated at the channel level.
Supporting climate policy
- If you work in PR/communications, collaborate with the government relations team to develop communications strategies and campaigns to publicly support climate legislation. (See this Patagonia example.)
- With your government relations team, be ready to develop public statements on climate policy. (See World Resources Institute’s guidance on how to write an impactful corporate climate statement.)
Team travel
- Minimize carbon-intensive business travel for you and your team, and opt for virtual gatherings. If possible, instead of flying, choose lower-carbon travel options, such as the train.
Foster dialogue and action
- Build capacity and knowledge by connecting with other colleagues on the finance team – and beyond – at your organization. Come together to brainstorm climate action steps (check out Project Drawdown's Discover page for ideas), share best practices, and raise your collective concern at team and all-staff meetings.
Ready to take action? Here are some questions and ideas to help you get started:
Take stock
Identify your company’s corporate sustainability and climate commitments, if any.
- Are these goals connected to your team’s goals?
- Can you integrate the above actions into your company, team, or individual performance objectives?
- Look at your company’s current marketing policies. Do they consider sustainability and climate? What about production?
- If your company is already telling a “green” story, is it substantiated by actions?
- If you work for an agency, does your company take clients that are part of or enable the fossil fuel and other extractive/polluting industries?
Make needed changes yourself or reach out to someone who can
- What decision-making power do you have? Can you implement these actions yourself or do you need to raise the issue with a supervisor?
- Is there anyone with decision-making power already on board with climate action? Or is there someone you might be able to influence?
Test the waters by sharing your own interest in climate action with other key colleagues and gauging their response. Consult power-mapping tools for help.
You don’t have to do it alone
Is there anyone else in your department that is also climate-concerned? Join forces to show broad support for integrating climate action into marketing and throughout the organization. Consider writing a letter or petition to leadership, or bringing up your concerns at an all-staff meeting.
Resources
- Clean Creatives is an advocacy campaign for those in advertising and public relations to pledge not to take fossil fuel clients.
- AdGreen helps the advertising industry avoid the environmental impacts of production by providing free resources and tools.
- Fossil Free Media offers talking points that are incredibly helpful for communicating about climate change.
- Patagonia’s Buy Less, Demand More campaign offers a great example of using marketing to promote a climate-focused campaign.
- Green the Bid helps those who work in commercial production make their operations and processes more sustainable.
- The Badvertising campaign aims to stop advertisements for industries causing and exacerbating the climate emergency. (Note: this campaign is UK-focused.)
- Climate Designers has a great climate design resources library, including resources for communications design and graphic design.
- Futerra’s Stories to Save the World is a toolkit for how to create effective climate stories that bring more people into the movement and inspire action.
- The World Federation of Advertisers released their Global Guidance on Environmental Claims 2022, which outlines six principles for detering greenwashing in company marketing practices.
- The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook provides “principles and guidance on how to align consumer-facing communication across the global fashion industry with sustainability targets. The playbook is geared toward the fashion industry, but includes information relevant to all products and industries.
- This blog post by Google provides helpful tips on what to avoid when communicating about sustainability.
- The United Nations Global Compact’s Roadmap for Integrated Sustainability includes a guide on how to integrate climate action into the marketing, branding, and public relations function.
- Project Drawdown worked with Google to develop their Sustainability Marketing Playbook, which outlines a framework for integrating sustainability throughout marketing operations.
- Check out Futerra and BEworks’ Low Carbon Lifestyles Wheel, to help you develop behavior change campaigns, highlighting the benefits of climate action for your consumers.
The Drawdown Labs Job Function Action Guides will help employees understand how their roles are critical in addressing the climate crisis, as well as implement high-impact solutions and navigate key considerations for taking action inside the workplace.