‘Every Ducking Day Is Earth Day’: Brands Mark the Holiday With Advocacy and Receipts

As greenwashing becomes riskier, consumers turn savvier, and climate change accelerates, brand messaging around Earth Day is shifting.

Rather than simply turning a logo green or tossing a one-off donation toward an environmental charity, some brands are taking it a step further—demonstrating sustainable practices through educational campaigns and spearheading advocacy efforts.

It’s all happening amid a shift toward more positive, solutions-focused climate messaging instead of doom and gloom. Fear of greenwashing is fueling a greenhushing trend, and at the same time inflationary pressures are squeezing budgets and pocketbooks, leading brands to prioritize cost savings over eco-benefits in messaging.

The beginning of 2023 saw a 47% drop in sustainability-related marketing messages, according to AI-supported data platform CreativeX, following steady growth between 2020 and 2022. Just 4% of ads over the last three years include sustainability messages, a new report showed.

What’s left, though, highlights some interesting trends toward more accountability, more advocacy and more optimism. Three campaigns from organic rice company Lundberg Family Farms, Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future and footwear brand Rothy’s demonstrate how sustainability marketing trends are playing out this Earth Day.

Less fire, more AI

Fridays For Future, the climate advocacy organization led by activist Greta Thunberg, has made its mark in the marketing world by creating some of the most visceral and devastating climate change ads. “Our House Is on Fire,” from 2020, depicted an eery and surreal scene: A family calmly gets ready for the day, brushing teeth, eating breakfast, etc., while the house burns and smolders around them.

The group has also created travel posters showing how climate change will impact famous destinations in countries like Italy, Australia and Switzerland, and a chilling spot demonstrating what wildfires—predicted to worsen as the climate warms—are doing to California.

In contrast, this year’s campaign drops the climate horror in favor of zeroing in on the people with the most sway when it comes to climate policy. With the help of AI, Fridays For Future and agency Fred & Farid created portraits of 20 world leaders as children, each holding the earth in their hands like a toy.

“Now is when we decide how we want to go on as a civilization,” Katharina Maier, lead organizer for Fridays For Future U.S., said in a statement. “Will we create a livable, just, equitable future for everyone? Or will we let present and future generations live with chaos and destruction?”

Regenerative ducking agriculture

Lundberg Family Farms was founded in the 1970s, but its roots go back to the 1930s. Albert and Frances Lundberg left Nebraska in 1937 during the Dust Bowl era, finding their way to California’s Sacramento Valley with a goal to “leave the land better than you found it.”

The company began selling its organic rice in 1972, using regenerative agriculture practices to avoid soil degradation and build wildlife preservation into the process of farming. These practices also play an important role in carbon sequestration, with some estimates showing better farming practices could absorb up to 200 gigatons of carbon by the end of the century.

This week, Lundberg launched a new campaign that highlights those practices—with a special focus on its partnership with California Waterfowl to protect baby ducks discovered in its rice fields.

“We have been farming regenerative organic now for five generations,” Suzanne Sengelmann, chief growth officer at Lundberg Family Farms, told Adweek.

But while regenerative agriculture has become a buzzy term in sustainability-focused marketing circles, Lundberg wanted to keep it simple. The campaign kicked off with a full-page ad in The New York Times, announcing that “Every Ducking Day Is Earth Day.”

A push for better recycling

Recycling is one of the most promising, yet complex, solutions that we have available as businesses work to transition away from fossil fuels—especially those used as a base for petroleum-based fibers and packaging.

But as has been documented by groups like Beyond Plastics, less than 6% of plastic in the U.S. gets recycled. As we work toward a more circular economy, recycling systems must improve.

One way to make that happen is with legislation that puts a deposit on bottles—incentivizing consumers and independent collectors to bring those containers to collection centers in exchange for that deposit. New York, one of the few states in the U.S. that has a bottle law on the books, puts a 5 cent deposit on each bottle—a price that’s stayed consistent since the bill was passed in 1982.

Rothy’s, a footwear brand that turns post-consumer plastic into shoes, launched a campaign this week to increase the deposit on those bottles. Like Lundberg, Rothy’s kicked off the campaign last week with a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking readers to “Stop Recycling Like It’s 1982.” Analysts estimate that increasing the deposit to 10 cents would save 773 million bottles from landfill each year, the ad explained.

“When we realized that so few people had heard of this legislation, we saw an opportunity to elevate the issue by rallying our community and platforms to mobilize,” Jamie Gersch, CMO of Rothy’s, told Adweek. “We hope that this initiative will inspire others to join us in taking bold action toward a healthier, happier planet and demonstrate that there is power in the collective. Small changes, as small as a nickel, can make a big difference.”