Last week between the rosé-fueled networking sessions and adtech-funded yacht parties at the Cannes Lions Festival, Coca-Cola and Ogilvy bagged a Grand Prix in the print and publishing category for “Recycle Me.”

The winning campaign features striking images of the classic Coca-Cola logo on a bright red background as it appears after a can has been crushed—with the outline of the can itself cut from the picture. Below the image, it says simply, “Recycle Me,” translated for the relevant market.

But not everyone thought Coca-Cola crushed it.

Some marketers and climate activists have condemned the decision, accusing the festival of rewarding greenwashing. They argue that crushing cans goes against some guidance from recyclers and distracts from Coca-Cola’s overall impact on the environment without addressing the more pressing issue of plastic pollution.

One senior marketer at a holding company-owned agency, speaking on condition of anonymity after returning home from Cannes, described the pick as “generally laughable, even outside of sustainability circles.” Calling the win “ironic,” they said it contributed to a “growing mistrust” of the awards overall.

Sustainability stumbles in Cannes

Describing the work as “iconic,” and an “inspiration,” jury president John Raúl Forero said it met the requirements he and his fellow jurors were looking for in the category. Forero declined to comment on the backlash.

“It is a campaign that, due to its simplicity, power in the image, elegance, purity in the graphics and power in the message, represented exactly what we were looking for,” Forero said. “We wanted to somehow reclaim the strength that classic print can have.”

For marketing professionals and climate activists in the audience during the Cannes Lions Festival, some felt that awarding Coca-Cola for recycling efforts, given the company’s production of single-use plastics and outsized impact on global plastic pollution, erodes industry confidence in the organizers.

“It’s a beautiful, creatively crafted ad, but it reeks of green lighting—putting the emphasis on [Coca-Cola’s] not-so-bad packaging vs. doing something meaningful about the 3 million tons of plastic packaging it produces a year,” said Jo Balchin, sustainability strategist at agency Enviral. “Wouldn’t it be refreshing for Coca-Cola to take its vast marketing budget and invest it in better packaging solutions and undoing the great damage it has caused, then tell this story? It would be a far better story to tell.”

In response, Coca-Cola pointed to its World Without Waste strategy, which pledges to cut virgin plastic use by 3 million metric tons (to 12 million from 15 million) by 2025. As of 2022, though, the company hadn’t reduced its use of virgin plastic at all, according to its sustainability report, and the company declined to give any further updates in response to ADWEEK’s questions.

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