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Sustainability and environmental issues have been a part of South by Southwest’s focus for more than a decade—and this year was no different, with brands like Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia and Slack bringing green messaging to the Texas capital through more creative mediums.
Since former U.S. vice president Al Gore gave a keynote on climate and the future in 2013, the festival has included climate in different capacities with more than 300 climate-related sessions in total, with climate change-specific tracks beginning in 2019.
Clean Creatives partnered with Ben & Jerry’s to give out free ice cream to attendees, offering flavors that called out the greenwashing messages from major oil and gas companies. Patagonia kicked off its 50-year anniversary campaign at SXSW, which is focused on supporting activism, conscious consumption and connection to nature through sport. Slack, which created its biggest activation to date for the festival, put sustainability at the center of its decisions around how to build and reuse experiential marketing materials.
Scooping out ‘fossil fuel lies’
With an ice cream truck parked on East 6th Street just a short walk from downtown Austin, Texas, where most of SXSW’s official programming resides, the Clean Creatives team handed out free scoops of Ben & Jerry’s to anyone walking by—official badge-holders or the general public.
Clean Creatives, a campaign launched in 2020 by executive director Duncan Meisel and Fossil Free Media’s Jamie Henn, aims to end the ad industry’s relationship with fossil fuels.
Over the first weekend of SXSW, people were reintroduced to familiar flavors from Ben & Jerry’s with new titles and descriptions that pointed out the shortcomings in Big Oil’s climate plans while also calling out the advertising and PR agencies that have helped energy brands sell those plans to the public.
“We wanted to reach people we haven’t had a chance to speak to in the creative industry in a way that was approachable and informative,” Meisel explained. “Hopefully [we] gave them some information they hadn’t thought about before about fossil fuel polluters and the way that they are impacting the planet.”
On March 12, the group hosted a panel in front of the ice cream truck, which included Kristy Drutman, climate creator and founder of the Green Jobs Board; Brian O’Kelley, founder and CEO of Scope3; and Sam Hornsby, founder and CEO of Triptk, a Havas agency that was the first holding company-owned shop to sign the Clean Creatives pledge.