Climate Groups Prioritize Collaboration Over Disruption at This Year’s Cannes Lions

As the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity kicked off, an uninvited, award-winning former marketer bounded onto the stage.

The goal of Gustav Martner, now head of creative for Greenpeace Nordic, was to wrench the focus away from the organizers in the name of the climate movement. He returned his own gold lion—which he’d won in 2007 for a Volkswagen campaign—and quickly unrolled a banner calling for a ban on fossil fuel advertising before being swept offstage by security guards.

This year, a climate activist will again take the Palais’s main stage—this time, with an invite.

On June 22, Will Skeaping, a strategist and activist with environmental group Extinction Rebellion (XR), will speak alongside data analytics firm Kantar, which will highlight its new sustainability marketing research, and alcohol giant Asahi on the role of the ad industry in the fight against climate change.

It’s part of what’s expected to be a broader tonal shift among the climate contingent of this year’s Cannes Lions Festival. Rather than focusing heavily on disruptive stunts, many climate groups are ready for deeper conversations with ad industry professionals, whether that’s low- and mid-level creatives or Adland’s top decision-makers.

“There’s been a real shift in the way that the industry has begun to think about the relationship with major polluters,” Duncan Meisel, executive director of activist group Clean Creatives, told journalists. “There’s an opportunity in Cannes this year […] to really up the ambition of the industry.”

Activists take the stage

Founded in 2018, XR gained notoriety in the U.K. and worldwide for its disruptive tactics, which often resulted in protesters being arrested like in 2019.

However, the group announced a temporary strategy shift for 2023 on the eve of the New Year. Members would focus less on direct action and more on building the cultural momentum necessary for climate action, the new statement explained, prioritizing “attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.”

XR’s presence at the Cannes Lions Festival aligns with this new strategy, Skeaping told Adweek.

“There’s a lot of people hiding behind the hyper objects of brands,” he said, specifically highlighting oil companies and their ad partners. “We need to remove that huge branding mask and start revealing the people who are making these decisions, […] people who are deciding to support the fossil fuel industry by taking on those clients.”

Elsewhere along the Croisette, independent programming is a significant part of the Cannes experience.

Clean Creatives—alongside climate networking NGO Creatives for Climate, climate-focused ad network Purpose Disruptors, sustainable ad-tech consulting firm Scope3 and the Dutch Embassy of Creativity—is hosting the Next Level Climate Summit, a half-day event on June 20 featuring panel discussions and talks focused on the ad industry’s role in the climate crisis.

Speakers will include Creatives for Climate initiator Lucy von Sturmer, The Shed 28’s Rupen Desai, Purpose Disruptors’ Rob McFaul, Scope3 co-founder Brian O’Kelley and Oxford Sustainable Law Programme’s Ben Franta, among others.

“The vision is that it’s a space that feels a little more open to conversation,” Meisel explained. “The opportunity for us is to get feedback from [marketers] about ‘Why isn’t this actionable yet? What are the barriers?’ Hopefully, we’re approaching this in a way that people don’t feel like we’re screaming at them, but that we are actually interested in that back and forth.”

Ok, so there are a few stunts

But while there’s more focus on open discussion in the programming planned, that doesn’t mean that some light disruption is off the table.

Content creators from Clean Creatives will be on La Croisette with a series of interactive stunts similar to last year. That includes things like the climate mirror, which has “This person is impacted by climate change,” emblazoned above a person’s reflection, and an activity that requires passersby to choose a path of working for fossil fuel clients or supporting climate action.

Creatives for Climate is evolving their Baywatch-themed stunt from last year into a secret agent-style action they call the “Greenwash Swatch.” The goal of the stunt, which will consist of agents armed with paint swatch booklets featuring examples of greenwashing tactics, is to hijack conversations to educate attendees on the different shapes that climate misinformation and greenwashing can take.

“We’re hoping, collectively, to build a culture whereby young talent are not willing to work for [agencies with fossil fuel clients],” von Sturmer said. “We’re building a pressure cooker of talent and green agencies, ethical agencies that are willing to step up and be braver and bolder.”