‘secret agents of change’ will be taking over La Croisette at Cannes Lions
Creatives for Climate wants you - individuals, agencies and brands - to become agents of change. Here’s how.
This Cannes Lions Festival week (19th-23rd June), keep your eyes on La Croisette as NGO Creatives for Climate launches new tools to build a collective of change agents united in its mission to tackle greenwashing at the source.
The Creatives for Climate secret agents will be roaming La Croisette empowered with the ‘greenwash watch toolkit’, interrupting rosé-fuelled conversations to hijack business-as-usual meetings, and firmly centre the conversation on climate action within advertising.
The tool in question, the Greenwash Swatch, is a framework created by think tank Planet Tracker that identifies an increasingly complex greenwashing landscape, including new techniques used by brands such as greencrowding, greenrinsing, and greenshifting.
Transformed into a paint swatch booklet that fits into handbags and pockets, the toolkit is designed to be pulled out by attendees to identify examples of greenwashing at any moment, providing a simple and provocative way to fuel conversations about brand accountability online. The #greenwashwatch will hijack online conversation and create a counter narrative from ordinary people back to brand, subversing power and driving conversation far and wide.
Initiator and Chairwoman Lucy von Sturmer says, “Creativity for good means nothing if we do not rise as an industry to tackle creativity for bad. Standing against greenwashing is standing against tactics of delay and increasingly illegal brand behaviour. Unfortunately, as more agencies and brands jump on the ‘green wagon’, we expect to see a TONNE of criminal behaviour on the Croisette this year.”
During the festival, to gather momentum and recruit more agents to join, Creatives for Climate is partnering with Clean Creatives to launch the Change Agent Happy Hour on Tuesday 20th June from 19:00-20:30, where it will be issuing an additional 100 toolkits to attendees to inspire collective action within their professional organisations and across their broader networks.
Creatives for Climate has also partnered with the Clean Creatives Climate Summit at the Embassy of Dutch Creativity and will be hosting a panel titled ‘Tackling the climate crisis is tackling the talent crisis’ on Tuesday 20th June. This panel will feature a broad range of actors from across the industry - brand representatives, agency leaders as well as grassroots activists and entrepreneurs on the ground, exploring questions such as, can solving the climate crisis solve the talent crisis? Can upskilling for climate build better agencies and brands?
This action at Cannes builds on the release of the Creatives for Climate’s landmark Greenwash Watch Course, launched at Cannes in 2022. The training is a cross-industry effort created in collaboration with industry experts such as professor Gill Wilson and marketing expert Alex Weller from Patagonia to rapidly scale the industry’s ability to challenge briefs, identify greenwashing, and deliver projects with real impact.
You can watch the Cannes 2022 launch here
The Greenwash Watch agents’ will be rewarding those that use the Greenwash Swatch tool online during Cannes Lions week with free access to the Greenwash Watch training programme. The aim is to bridge the gap between advertising and action, recruiting attendees and their businesses to become Greenwashing ‘secret agents of change’.
As featured in Campaign
Roastbrief: https://roastbrief.us/2023/06/creatives-for-climates-secret-agents-of-change-will-be-taking-over-la-croisette-at-this-years-cannes-lions-festival-of-creativity/
Brand News Italy: https://brand-news.it/brand/istituzioni/no-profit/creatives-for-climate-pronta-a-smascherare-tutte-le-varianti-di-greenwashing-ai-cannes-lions/
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