Revealed: British ad firm’s billion-dollar greenwash of US oil industry

A British advertising conglomerate has helped the oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP spend an estimated $1.5bn (£1.1bn) on adverts in the US since the 2015 Paris agreement to tackle the climate crisis, a report shows. London-based WPP was the leading advertising group serving the US’s oil industry over the past decade, according to analysis by the climate investigations platform DeSmog. The figure is nearly twice the respective amounts linked to its US rivals Omnicom and Interpublic Group (IPG), which merged in November. During this period, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP employed “deceptive and misleading” communications strategies designed to thwart policies to tackle the climate crisis by curbing the use of fossil fuels, a congressional investigation concluded in April 2024. WPP’s services – from developing ideas for ads and designing logos, to securing ad space and analysing target audiences – were crucial to maintaining the oil industry’s public image, according to current and former WPP employees. WPP is estimated to have earned millions of dollars a year from this work. Victoria Harvey , who has a PhD in the ad industry’s response to the climate crisis from the University of East Anglia, and reviewed DeSmog’s methodology, said: “The UK prides itself on climate leadership and yet WPP, the supposed jewel of the British advertising industry, is facilitating dangerously misleading advertising in the US. …