The ad watchdog has clamped down on ‘greenwashing’, ruling that ads oil giants Shell and Petronas misled customers by highlighting their renewables arms in ads without revealing the “overall environmental impact of their business”.
The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that oil giants Shell breached its code around misleading ads with a poster and television ad that highlight the number of households that “use 100% renewable electricity from Shell”. The television ad also mentioned Shell’s electric car chargers and a “wind project”.
Petronas, meanwhile, breached the code over an ad where it said it worked to “reduce emissions, grow renewable energy, bring education to more, champion social impact and promote a circular economy, as well as achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050”.
Campaign group Adfree Cities - which describes itself as a “network of groups… concerned about the impacts of corporate advertising on our health, wellbeing, environment climate, communities and the local economy” - raised a complaint about the Shell ad to the ASA.
Adfree Cities said that by omitting information about the overall environmental impact of Shell’s business, the ad was misleading. As one of the world’s largest oil firms, Shell’s operations estimated to be responsible for roughly one sixtieth of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the world’s ten biggest polluters.
Shell, though, said the ad was only meant to highlight the renewables arm of its business, and was not intended to suggest it wasn’t also involved in less clean forms of energy.
“Consumers would already be well-informed regarding that aspect of their operations and, in fact, would primarily associate their brand with the sale of petrol,” the company said.
It pointed to market research that showed a large level of awareness of Shell’s petrol business compared to much lower familiarity for its renewables work, and said it aimed to “bridge that gap”.
However, the ASA upheld the complaint. It said that while viewers would not think Shell had no involvement in fossil fuels, they may be looking to seek out energy companies that are “making meaningful progress towards transitioning away from higher-carbon products and services”.
“However, they were unlikely to be aware of the details of this in relation to specific companies, and ads were therefore likely to mislead consumers if they misrepresented the contribution that lower-carbon initiatives played, or would play in the near future, as part of the overall balance of a company’s activities,” the watchdog said.
It ruled that the ad would “give the impression that low-carbon energy products comprised a significant proportion of the energy products Shell invested in and sold in the UK in 2022”, when this was not the case.
As a result, it said that information about the proportion of Shell’s business that was related to clean energy should have been included, and the absence of these facts made the ad misleading.
Veronica Wignall, a campaigner from Adfree Cities, said the ruling was a landmark that would prevent oil giants from running “greenwashing” campaigns.
“Today’s official ban on Shell’s adverts marks the end of the line for fossil fuel greenwashing in the UK” she said. “The world’s biggest polluters will not be permitted to advertise that they are ‘green’ while they build new pipelines, refineries and rigs.”
Wignall told the Standard that the group would continue to work until all fossil fuel ads were banned, and said the next step would be ads for electric vehicles.
“The whole car industry has moved their advertising over to electric vehicles, but they are still huge sellers of petrol cars,” she said. “And even electric vehicles rely on energy from the grid, and the grid right now is not clean.”
“There are people making these adverts. Ad agencies are going to face more regulatory complaints and legal complaints.”
The ASA then itself challenged an ad from Malaysian oil giant Petronas, as “part of a wider piece of work on environmental claims in the Energy sector”.
Again, it said the ad omitted information about the true impact of the oil company’s business.
