Spearheaded by campaign group Clean Creatives, a group of 26 B-Corp certified advertising agencies are calling on the brand to request immediate action to condemn agencies who are B-Corp certified but are working with fossil fuel companies.
The agencies, including Good Stuff Partners, Greenhouse Partners, A Little Better Co and more have signed an official complaint letter.
The letter comes after Havas signed a high-profile contract with Shell, “Havas, as a parent company of a network that includes B corp agencies, has agreed to become the main agency for Shell.”
“This contract will require work from certain B Corp subsidiaries in their network. Additionally, both the agency MSQ has been providing marketing services to Shell since 2022, and the agency Tam-Tam\TBWA has represented Petro-Canada from 2016 – 2022, while also maintaining B Corp status”
Subscribe to Sustainability Beat for free
Sign up here to get the latest sustainability news sent straight to your inbox every day
The group’s demands include declaring and applying the same criteria to B Corp agencies with fossil fuel and high polluter clients. They are also calling for B Corp to do the same for parent companies of agencies with B Corp certification.
Speaking at a media briefing Clean Creatives executive director Duncan Meisel said he felt that B Corp continuing to certify agencies which work with fossil fuels was “cynical” on the part of agencies that “do the work”.
CEO and founder of Good Agency Chris Norman added: “It is a binary question and it doesn’t require what b lab is suggesting is a process that should take a year or more”.
He added that their aim was to make sure that B lab align with what we’re signing up to which is a commitment not to work with fossil fuels”.
Asked about what they would do should B Corp fail to take heed, Norman said: “We will become more unbearable to them. We believe in working within. We believe a lot of what they do is good but they need to respond to the community as well”.
