At this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity (19th-23rd
June), NGO Creatives for Climate will
launch a new tool aimed at building a collective of change agents united in its
mission to tackle greenwashing at the source.
Creatives for Climate ‘secret agents’ will be roaming the festival with the
organization’s Greenwash Watch toolkit — interrupting the rosé-fueled
conversations and business-as-usual meetings to firmly center the conversation
on climate action within advertising.
The tool in question, the Greenwash Swatch, is based on a
framework
created by think tank Planet Tracker that identifies an increasingly
complex greenwashing
landscape
— including new trends such as greencrowding, greenrinsing, and greenshifting.
Image credit: Creatives for Climate
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Formatted into a handy paint swatch booklet that fits into handbags and pockets,
the toolkit is designed to be a reference for attendees to identify examples of
greenwashing at any moment — providing a simple and provocative way to fuel
conversations about brand accountability. For the second year in a
row, the #greenwashwatch will hijack
conversation at Cannes Lions and online, and create a counternarrative from
ordinary people back to brands — subverting power and driving conversation far
and wide.
“Creativity for good means nothing if we do not rise as an industry to tackle
creativity for bad,” says Creatives for Climate Initiator and Chairwoman Lucy
von Sturmer. “Standing against
greenwashing is standing against tactics of delay and increasingly illegal brand
behavior. Unfortunately, as more agencies and brands jump on the ‘green wagon,’
we expect to see a tonne of criminal behavior on the Croisette this year.”
During the festival, to gather momentum and recruit more agents to join,
Creatives for Climate is partnering with Clean
Creatives to launch the Change Agent Happy Hour —
Tuesday 20th June from
19:00-20:30
— where it will be issuing an additional 100 toolkits to attendees to inspire
collective action within their professional organizations and across their
broader networks.
Creatives for Climate has also partnered with the Clean Creatives Climate Summit
at the Embassy of Dutch Creativity and will be hosting a panel titled
"Tackling the climate crisis is tackling the talent crisis" on Tuesday 20th
June. This panel will feature a broad range of actors from across the industry -
brand representatives, agency leaders as well as grassroots activists and
entrepreneurs on the ground, exploring questions such as:
This year's action at Cannes builds on the release of the Creatives for Climate’s
landmark Greenwash Watch
Course,
launched at Cannes in 2022. The training is a cross-industry effort created in
collaboration with industry experts such as professor Gill
Wilson and Patagonia Head of
Studio Alex Weller to
rapidly scale the industry’s ability to challenge briefs, identify greenwashing
and deliver projects with real impact.
The Greenwash Watch agents will reward those that use the Greenwash Swatch tool
online during Cannes Lions week with free access to the Greenwash Watch
training program. The aim is to
bridge the gap between advertising and action — recruiting attendees and their
businesses to become greenwashing ‘secret agents of change.’
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published Jun 5, 2023 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST