And the Moon is Made of Green Cheese

It’s time for another “green” issue, which you’d think we’d relegate to springtime or summer at the latest, but unfortunately greenwashing is a year-round biz for those in the biz of – you guessed it – greenwashing.

While we’ve written about greenwashing and some of its variants previously, we think it’s a good practice to shine a spotlight on practitioners of the dark advertising arts whenever we can.  Because, you know, people might think twice before supporting these companies.

Plus, I’ve uncovered a new variant of the disease, one that’s cold and fresh to me and possibly to you as well.

I harvested these examples this past week on my LinkedIn feed, which yielded a bounty of leafy "green" learning about interesting outbreaks of corporate misdirection around the world.

So, here’s the term I hadn’t heard before:  Green freezing. 

Google it, and you’ll receive search results with a million and one ways to freeze fresh green beans.

Dig further, and you’ll find an article from the the American Forest Foundation describing green freezing as companies retreating from their climate goals for fear of retaliation in the marketplace, likely stemming from attacks on ESG policies.  It positions green freezing as being far more dangerous than, say, greenhushing – which is when companies just stop communicating about their climate and other sustainability goals.  That’s because this backtrack from the backlash decelerates progress significantly at a time when we need corporations to be boldly moving forward toward reducing their emissions.

Thanks to Jenny Morgan for surfacing this on LinkedIn.

Next up:  I wrote about astroturfing this past summer, and here’s another gem brought to you by the good folks at advertising holding company WPP.

Astroturfing commonly involves setting up a fake grassroots nonprofit to help a corporation achieve its PR or policy aims.

In this instance, astroturfing takes the form of creating a team of social media influencers.

This occurred in Uganda, where the MetropolitanRepublic PR agency, of which WPP is part owner, created a campaign called #ActionForSustainability. It did this for TotalEnergies, a French oil company, with the objective to quash negative PR and protests against the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline project.

They recruited a team of social influencers to activate the campaign, expressed online as #ActionsSpeakLouder, to create a positive vibe around the project's so-called sustainability efforts. The campaign was so successful the agency won an advertising award for the effectiveness of its work.

The only problem:  Nowhere in the campaign was it stated that the team of "organic" social influencers was being paid by the agency, which was being paid by the oil company. Nothing grassroots about it.  And all this pro-pipeline sustainability messaging occurred at the same time that activist protestors were being beaten and arrested by the authorities.

That’s my kind of award-winning PR campaign!

Curiously, a quick scan of MetropolitanRepublic's website doesn't show this project in their portfolio, nor was TotalEnergies listed on its client roster. You'd think an award-winning project like this would be trumpeted, which leads you to wonder why it's absent. Hmmm. Could someone be feeling a little sheepish about the work in retrospect? Or perhaps it was simply crowded out by the firm's commitment to promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals and its values statement of "We believe no African should be left behind."

You can read more about it here and thanks to Clean Creatives for bringing this to our attention on LinkedIn, with credit to DeSmog for its indepth reporting.

Lastly, let’s look at what I’ll call “Unintended Truth in Branding” with a brazen attempt at greenwashing that has run "afoul" of a consumer advocacy group.

Tyson Foods, that paragon of “fowl” corporate behavior, has been marketing what it calls “climate-smart” beef.

(Okay, okay – no more puns this issue. Tyson has a mega poultry business, but after all, this is about the beef!)

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit, nonpartisan consumer advocacy organization, is suing Tyson for “taking advantage of well-intentioned preferences of shoppers by making false statements in marketing materials.” EWG further contends that industrial beef pollution can never be “climate smart” because of the emissions associated with raising cows on an industrial scale.

Oh, and the brand of Tyson’s “climate-smart” beef?  Brazen Beef. As a branding guy, I am laughing my ass off thinking about how this idea was pitched in the corporate conference room.  "It’s alliterative.  It’s bold.  And for once, it’s true!" As in, so brazen with the truth.

So, yes, Tyson  would likely also have you believe the moon is indeed made from green cheese.

Here’s more about Tyson’s misdirection, with thanks to Susan Doherty for shouting this out via LinkedIn.

Godspeed, friends.

Russ

💬 Quote of the Week

"I don't know whether I prefer Astroturf to grass. I never smoked Astroturf." Joe Namath

💥 Quick Hits

• Reactivating an activist brand – I just love this rebrand of the activist nonprofit Mozilla (which makes and operates the Firefox browser) – hat's off to branding agency JKR for the sharp work.

• The dangerous world of environmental activists – In an update to our article "Would You Die for a Butterfly?" published earlier this year, the country of Colombia has registered the most deaths of environmental activists anywhere in the world.

• Will AI destroy or save the planet? – We're hoping its not a binary choice. Read on for a take on some of its environmental costs and benefits.

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