Clean Creatives, the pro-environment industry group, is out with a new study that purports to show a major marketing pivot by the fossil fuel industry. Instead of suggesting that they are part of the solution to climate change with new and green alternatives that can be phased in over time, BP, Chevron, Shell and Exxon are “now competing to make fossil fuel dependence look reasonable, necessary, even patriotic.” 

The ad industry is driving the new messaging, the report asserts. 

Called “Toxic Accounts,” the report analyzed 1,859 ads, press releases and social media campaigns between 2020 and 2024 to document the purported shift in strategy. 

“Instead of actually investing in renewables, oil and gas companies are promoting natural gas and CCS [carbon capture and storage] as sustainable technologies, even though they are derived from fossil fuels, will not work at scale, and will delay decarbonization,” the report asserts. 

Marketing campaigns are delaying a clean energy transition by presenting oil and gas as the only solution for energy security and economic stability, the report concludes. “Any illusion that agencies could nudge fossil fuel clients toward transition is gone. Oil and gas companies aren't interested in transitioning.They're prioritizing short-term returns and doubling down on fossil fuels.” 

Findings suggest the fossil fuel industry’s communications strategy has entered a new “gaslighting” phase.  

Campaigns in 2020 and 2021 emphasized climate targets and energy transition commitments. By 2023 - 2024, per the report, messaging increasingly framed oil and gas as permanent and essential to economic stability and national security. 

The report tracks the transition and shows a “consistent and coordinated narrative shift” across all four companies, the report found. CC said it focused on the four major oil firms listed above because they operate globally, faced pressure to change their strategy in response to global politics, and released creative campaigns during the period on which the study focuses.  

“We excluded TotalEnergies and Petronas due to a lack of creative work available for analysis and did not include local oil majors, as they would not have been exposed to the same pressure to transition.” 

Clean Creatives worked with Source Nine Insights to build the dataset for the report. Source Nine created a custom generative pre-trained transformer to collect and organize publicly available campaign materials for the report. This includes YouTube videos; social media posts and digital ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram; executive speeches; press releases; interviews; and TV commercials on iSpot.tv, Ad Forum and Ads of the World. 

The full report can be found here. A film accompanying the report is available here.