How Fossil Fuel Mad Men Have Aided and Abetted the Industry’s Climate Denial

“Mad Men fueling the madness.” Nodding to the hit American TV show, that’s what UN Secretary General António Guterres last year called the advertising agencies that have “aided and abetted” the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial. This May, the UN rapporteur on human rights and climate change went a big step further: Not only should fossil fuel advertising be banned, Elisa Morgara said in a detailed report to the General Assembly, but criminal penalties should be imposed on anyone spreading climate change disinformation. The call to restrict fossil fuel ads have been embraced by almost 50 jurisdictions around the world, including such major cities as The Hague, Edinburgh, Sheffield, and Sydney.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel Mad Men are also facing pushback within their own ranks, as some of their fellow “creatives” blow the whistle and join with outside activists to confront their industry’s role in helping propel humanity toward a chaotic, deadly breakdown of the climate system. As of June 2025, more than 1,400 advertising agencies around the world have signed the “Clean Creatives” pledge to “decline any future contracts with fossil fuel companies, trade associations, or front groups.”

A climate movement in… advertising? That might seem ironic for an industry whose core purpose is to spur consumption. But like all spheres of society, the world of advertising has not been immune to the groundswell of climate organizing that emerged in the late 2010s, when demonstrations like Fridays for Future took center stage in global social movements.

In a 2019 open letter, the activist network Extinction Rebellion took the industry to task: “You can do anything you want and you can shift mass behavior in a heartbeat. One of the reasons we’ve got here is because you’ve been selling things to people that they don’t need. You are the manipulators and architects of that consumerist frenzy. Imagine what would happen if you devoted those skills to something better.”

“That was really good copy,” said Lucy von Sturmer of the 2019 letter—“good copy” being high praise in the ad industry where von Sturmer used to work. An industry “creative” who volunteered with Extinction Rebellion, von Sturmer ultimately founded Creatives for Climate, which offers “anti-greenwashing” trainings and “climate literacy” workshops for industry workers.

“Advertising plays a massive role in removing the burden of responsibility from corporations,” said Polina Zabrodskaya, who was suspended from her job at the London-based global ad agency AMV.BBDO in 2023 after expressing doubts about the sustainability claims made by one of the firm’s clients, the Mars company. “If you create this illusion that everything is sustainable and everything is environmentally friendly, people are lulled into a false sense of safety. Don’t worry about it. The oceans are fine. Children are going to school. Look, a happy child is running to school in West Africa. Buy chocolate!” said Zabrodskaya, who later left AMV.BBDO and is currently suing the firm for “belief discrimination.”

“Whistleblowers are vital in forcing change within the advertising industry,” said Gabriel Bourdon-Fattal, codirector of Climate Whistleblowers, a Paris-based NGO providing legal and strategic support in Zabrodskaya’s case. “In an industry as opaque and unregulated as this, insiders are stepping up to sound the alarm.”

Clean Creatives, the nonprofit that organized the pledge not to work for fossil fuel companies that has attracted 1,400 signatories, also publishes an “F-list” of agencies that do still work with oil and gas companies. The F-list aims to make it harder for such agencies to hire and retain quality employees, said Duncan Meisel, the executive director of Clean Creatives. “The best [employees] are not going to want to work at the agencies that are fossil fuel branded,” Meisel told The Nation. “If you can’t recruit that talent pool, you don’t have a future as an agency.”

But there are limits to how far an insider, “creative”-focused strategy can really change the industry. For every agency that turns down a contract with the likes of BP or Exxon, there’ll be a firm out there willing to do the dirty work. As the Financial Times has reported, there’s also the risk that the page may already be turning on the push to change the industry from within, as advertising readapts to a political and cultural mood set by the far right. In short, there’s likely no substitute for external, legal restrictions on what can be publicized and where.

An obvious precursor to today’s calls to ban fossil fuel ads are the bans the US government imposed on tobacco advertising—first in 1970, when such ads were banned on TV and radio, and then in 1995, when all tobacco advertising was banned (except for “point of sales” ads—for example, inside retail shops). But activists see relying on today’s Congress or president to limit fossil fuel advertising as a nonstarter. “There’s a lot of existing law that could be really powerful when applied,” said Meisel. “But we don’t pass laws in Congress anymore.”