Social Good or Social Smokescreen: Greenwashing
We asked the Secret Digital Veteran to tackle the thorny issue of how agencies can really make a difference while not getting distracted by corporate greenwashing and empty gestures.
It’s become increasingly important for companies to show social good, whether or not they actually do good. One of the areas where this applies is the environment. My issue with the way many companies trumpet their green credentials is not because I consider the environment unimportant, but precisely because I care about it so much. What I hate is seeing it broken down into meaningless token gestures.
It’s extremely easy to write a policy that will tick all the boxes for whatever social good you want to appear to care about. Brands abound with this behaviour, and consumers fall for it. Dove will tell you that beauty is more than skin deep, but they’ll use it to sell you beauty products. They’re also part of the same group as Lynx who only dropped their old misogynistic marketing line when it stopped working, not because they reached a moral epiphany. The virtual future could involve even more of this sort of virtue signalling.
The problem is that companies and individuals want to do just enough of the right things in order to continue to do an awful lot more of the bad things, whether by avoiding regulation, misleading their customers, or assuaging their own guilt.
The alcohol industry funds “Drink Aware” to fend off government intervention, slaps the logo on its adverts and continues to profit while the police and NHS deal with the effects of overconsumption. Gambling does the same with “When the fun stops, stop”. Public schools can claim public good and therefore avoid 20% VAT by basically letting the poor kids use their playing fields.
The environment is a particular hotbed right now. BP may be the masters of this, rebranding as a renewables company and buying up social media whilst continuing to make £7bn a quarter from fossil fuels. Airlines let you offset your carbon so you can keep racking up those unnecessary business miles but still tick the box. Unfortunately, offsetting is, according to Friends of the Earth, a ‘dangerously distracting con’; I’d rather they just cut out the ghost-flights. Packaging often boasts that it’s recyclable (not actually recycled), but again, this is a dangerous bit of guilt reduction. Forget “reduce” and “reuse”, you can buy as much stuff as you like so long as you chuck it in the green bin afterwards!
As a digital agency, there are some things that we can do:
Our operations are inherently low impact; London has great public transport and all we need to do our job is a laptop (though we’ve also gone paperless and reduced travel through flexible working and our laptops also receive a second lease of life with local schools when we’re done with them).
All new starters receive a keep-cup and water bottle to reduce single-use waste and can join the Cycle to Work scheme.
Beyond that: Let’s be honest, there’s a limit to what an independent agency can do. We’re too small to influence Google or Meta’s environmental priorities. But then again, the idea that the whole of the problem can be fixed by individuals* is another big lie that large companies have been very happy to see proliferate. In the same way that car manufacturers invented jay walking to shift the blame for being run over on to the pedestrian, so it is here. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all do our bit: I do recycle, but try to reduce, reuse and buy sustainably in the first place. My car is electric, my roof has solar panels and my garden is a little haven for insects. My ambition is to rewild something.
But what we really need is regulation at both national and global levels. That’s why we gave staff time off to attend the London climate march. And this is where voting matters. We need governments to act on decarbonisation, and carbon trading, and intensive farming, and biodiversity loss and a whole host of related issues including prosecuting the individuals and companies who’ve known about global warming since the 70s and busily covered it up.
Until then, let's not delude ourselves that surface changes are going to make any real difference. Or ask a tougher question - can your business model and your marketing KPIs factor in real environmental and sustainability goals?
Of course, Kinase will keep doing what we can, and if you work for an environmental charity who Kinase might be able to help make a real difference, please get in touch!
By Secret Digital Veteran
