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South African advertising and PR agencies named and shamed for collaborating with fossil fuel giants

South African advertising and PR agencies named and shamed for collaborating with fossil fuel giants
Kristin Engel
By Kristin Engel
17 Oct 2024
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In its 2024 ‘F-List report’, Clean Creatives South Africa names and shames 42 advertising and public relations agencies for working with fossil fuel companies, including TotalEnergies, Sasol, Shell, Engen and BP.

Many of South Africa’s advertising and public relations (PR) industries are not only failing to align with clean energy trends, but actively working to protect the fossil fuel industry from accountability. This is the message in a recent report by Clean Creatives South Africa, which names the South African PR and advertising agencies working with fossil fuel companies. 

This is the second edition of the F-List report, titled “A Flood of Greenwashing: 42 Advertising and PR Agency Contracts with the Fossil Fuel Industry in South Africa”.

The authors told Daily Maverick they sought to raise awareness of greenwashing and its impact on the environment by highlighting who the major enablers are of the fossil fuel industry’s lack of commitment to climate action, and how these collaborations have costly and deadly consequences for the environment and human life. 

The United Nations has said the evidence is clear: human activity is causing greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon and methane, to cover Earth in pollution. This pollution has warmed the world with dire consequences, including more extreme storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.

To prevent climate change and maintain a habitable Earth, emissions must be lowered to almost zero by 2050 and almost half by 2030.

But greenwashing presents a significant barrier in tackling this, as fossil fuel companies employ tactics that mislead the public, and promote nonsensical solutions to the climate crisis, diverting attention away from and postponing real, credible action. 

The “F-List” may seem quite a severe name but Nozuko Poni, Clean Creatives campaign manager in South Africa, told Daily Maverick that the list is intended to be a tool for the advertising and PR industry as the country moves towards a just transition. 

“Greenwashing happens successfully when we lend our talent to climate criminals, over the impact on the environment, therefore humanity… The report also aims to connect the dots for everyday people; that worsening climate patterns, the adverts they consume and the major polluters are all connected,” she said.

The methodology and what’s changed 


Clean Creatives’ 2024 methodology was done in collaboration with its global team and included gathering publicly available information from agency websites, creative portfolios, LinkedIn’s ad library, the Public Relations and Communications Association and O’Dwyers agency directories, the OpenSecrets lobbying database, and more. 

To ensure accuracy, Poni said each contract uncovered has at least three different sources.

The 2024 report lists 42 agency contracts in South Africa and fossil fuel companies including Shell, Engen, BP, TotalEnergies and Sasol. A further eight agency contracts from around the continent are included. 

“This year’s findings illustrate the fossil fuel industry’s reliance on a mixture of independent agencies and leading advertising and PR firms, all of whom are identified in the F-List 2024 report as engaging in several contracts with BP, TotalEnergies, Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil,” Poni said.

After last year’s report, three of the agencies mentioned in the report, or those to whom Clean Creatives SA reached out while compiling it, have taken the Clean Creatives pledge and turned down fossil fuel work. 

Clean Creatives SA is calling for advertising agencies to sign the pledge not to take on any new contracts with fossil fuel companies. But the pledge is often received with concern about how agencies will replace these big contracts, knowing how much they bring in and their operational costs. 

Poni told Daily Maverick this was a valid concern but the cost of tethering themselves to fossil fuel companies was a reputational risk that would eventually cost more.

Agencies and fossil fuel companies


The 42 contracts revealed between South African advertising and PR agencies and fossil fuel companies in 2023 and 2024 is a fraction of the Global F-List report compiled by Clean Creatives, which uncovered 1,010 contracts between 590 agencies and 332 fossil fuel clients in 70 countries over the same period.

The big names in the local report include Sasol, South Africa’s largest private greenhouse gas polluter, which uses a number of public relations and marketing agencies including Group Africa Marketing and Idea Engineers.

It also mentions TotalEnergies, represented by the Edelman agency. In August 2024, the South African Advertising Regulatory Board upheld a greenwashing complaint brought against TotalEnergies by the SA Fossil Ad Ban campaign. 

Read more: NGO lodges SA’s first ‘greenwashing’ advertising complaint with watchdog against TotalEnergies

The African Energy Chamber, which hosts conferences such as African Energy Week in Cape Town, was also named and shamed for promoting fossil fuels and even featuring a climate denialist keynote speaker in 2023. 

The chamber is represented by the APO Group and according to the report this agency appeared on the F-list for the second time for its ongoing support of the chamber’s work, which includes issuing press releases containing climate misinformation and pro-oil and gas messaging. 

Clean Creatives said that Greenpeace, which had been using the APO Group to distribute its press releases, notified them that they had dropped the company and moved to a different PR wire provider after last year’s F-list exposed the APO Group’s affiliation with the African Energy Chamber.

TotalEnergies and APO suggested they’d reply to Daily Maverick’s questions but no response had been received by the time of publication. They will be added once received. 

Daily Maverick also approached Edelman, Omnicom and Group Africa Marketing but has not received a response.

‘People need opportunities for upliftment’


Regency Global was listed as having contracts with BP, Glencore and Shell. Shani Kay, Regency Global spokesperson, told Daily Maverick they were not blind to the issues at hand but, fundamentally, there was no black-and-white answer on the matter.

“Yes we live in an environment precariously under threat, but we also have people and communities who need employment and opportunities for upliftment and for this we need mining and manufacturing and beneficiation for socioeconomic inclusion,” she said.

According to Kay, Regency Global was not in the business of marketing fossil fuels but highlighting some of the powerful and impactful work being done by businesses across multiple industries “that are authentically changing the lives of people for the better”.

“We have been banging on the sustainability drum long before it was fashionable or even remotely mainstream to do so. Our content campaigns started over 15 years ago in association with the UN, looking at the role of business in the sustainable development agenda, initially in response to the MDGs and then latterly the SDGs,” Kay said.

The stories Regency shot for Shell were about installing solar power for rural households who have previously had no access to electrification.

“Shell exists, they sell [a] product and make profit and we want to encourage them to spend more of those profits for the greater good. That is our point of departure,” Kay said.    

Regarding BP, Regency Global featured engineering bursaries and black women’s businesses that have grown as part of the BP value chain. 

“These are real people’s real stories of progress and if you want to call that greenwashing, so be it, but we see it has stories of what is possible for regular people. Every business has skeletons, every business can do better. We task ourselves with showing what transformation looks like, done well, in the lives of real, relatable South Africans,” Kay said. 

Clean Creatives is urging PR and advertising firms to refuse to collaborate with fossil fuel businesses, as more than 1,200 agencies globally and more than 68 local agencies have done, as South Africa experiences increasingly severe storms, floods and droughts. 

Signatories to the pledge include local agencies Paddington Station PR, The Whalley Collective, Alkemi Collective, Friday Street Club and DNA Brand Architects. 

The report, the authors said, is an appeal to the sector to join the worldwide movement towards a cleaner, more sustainable future and to stop supporting greenwashing. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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