category finalist
cleancreatives@fossilfree.media
The world's biggest advertising agencies have a dirty secret. Despite public commitments to sustainability, they continue to quietly serve fossil fuel clients, helping oil and gas companies maintain their image while the planet pays the price.
Agencies know the reputational and legal risks. That's why so much of this work stays hidden. There is no straightforward way for employees, clients, or the public to know which firms are serving polluters.
Clean Creatives’ F-List exists to change that. It gives creatives, brands, and consumers the facts they need to know who they're really working for.
In its fifth year, the 2025 F-List is the largest public database documenting relationships between advertising and PR agencies and their fossil fuel clients. It exposes 1,217 fossil fuel contracts held by 709 agencies, more than ever before.
These aren't abstractions. These are receipts. So that’s exactly how we chose to imagine the data. By putting the most important data in the form of receipts, we made it easy to digest and impossible to dispute.
Receipts are not only factual and objective, they also guide us toward transparency as the means to awareness, rather than shaming the agencies doing dirty work. Shame puts people on the defensive, closing off the conversation before it can begin. But a receipt simply shows what happened, and lets the facts speak for themselves.
First, we took to social media with teasers, posting both photographed, up-close content of the data printed out on real receipt paper, as well as video content that was filmed in New York City with physical printed receipts. We leaned into the idea of receipts as trash, showing receipts being pulled out of the trash or blowing in the wind.
As the campaign unfolded, the social content became more and more detailed. We introduced the FFIRE Index, which estimates what percentage of major agencies’ income comes from fossil fuel contracts, telling you how much risk they’ve taken on from dangerous fossil fuel clients. Our social approach also allowed us to take a deep dive into case studies of companies like Edelman.
Then, we took to the streets with out-of-home positioned outside agencies and holding companies including Edelman, Havas, Omnicom / IPG, and WPP. Our copy spoke directly to these agencies and our placement was impossible to ignore, seen right outside the offices as employees walked in and out for the day.
And of course, we got the industry talking. The campaign was covered by AdWeek, Campaign US, and more, reaching a total of 4,492,253 monthly unique users (MUUs). Our posts on Instagram and LinkedIn received 68.7k and 30.6k impressions respectively, with 5.8k site visits, a 262% increase month over month.
The F-List is a call to the ad and PR industry: the information is out there, the alternatives exist, and the moment to act is now. It's time for agencies to stop hiding behind greenwashed messaging and make a real choice about the world they want to help build.
