Purpose Disruptors needs disrupting

The ad industry and climate movement deserve better than selfish posturing

I usually try not to personalise these posts, and won’t do any naming of individuals here. But it’s impossible to write this one without being specific about an organisation called Purpose Disruptors.

Last night, an ad aired on Channel 4, titled #TheGoodAdvert. It was timed to coincide with climate change documentary ‘The Great Climate Fight’.

The 30-second spot opens with an apparent technical glitch, before a hesitant Simon Amstell voiceover comes in and apologises for being an advert. The script:

Hello… I’m.. I’m an advert and… I can’t, I can’t… I just feel awful about it. It’s erm… I’m always asking you to spend more. The message needs to be… You need to go out and spend more time in nature! With people you love, perhaps. Because haven’t we all got a part to play?

Endline: The future is ours to create

The ad is the brainchild of Purpose Disruptors, which describes itself as “a network of advertising insiders working together to reshape our industry to tackle climate change”. It was created by regular collaborators Iris Worldwide.

On the same day, the Guardian published The Guardian view on festive marketing: stop spending like there’s no tomorrow. Following the Guardian’s eager coverage of this year’s Christmas ads, the editorial engages in hand-wringing about excessive consumption and includes specific evidence for the carbon impact of advertising:

Clearly advertising shifts units, but at what cost? The Guardian reports that an award-winning 2018 campaign for Audi saw the marque gain 132,700 in extra car sales, which produced the equivalent annual greenhouse gas emissions of Uganda. Promoting a lifestyle of overconsumption – SUVs rather than hatchbacks, long-haul flights not rail travel – is good for business but bad for the planet.

As it happens, this evidence comes from the same people behind the Simon Amstell ad: a combination of Purpose Disruptors and Iris Worldwide. Although it’s quoted with confidence by The Guardian, the research has been discredited—and it doesn’t take much insight to see why. Is it really credible that a single ad campaign for Audi would produce the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Uganda? If that was even close to true, and you multiply it by all the car ad campaigns that ran that year and every other year, wouldn’t the planet already be a charred cinder by now?

As pointed out in the article above, the researchers behind ‘Advertised emissions’ used the cartoonishly simple methodology of taking the claimed increase in sales (132,700) and multiplying it by the lifetime emissions of a single Audi car. This ignores how most of those sales were going to happen anyway, because the effect of car advertising is mainly about competition between which brands get bought. No one who is not already in need of a car goes out and buys an Audi because the ad convinced them. Even ignoring that huge factor, to put Audi sales down to their most recent ad campaign shows a touching faith in the short-term effects of advertising: the reality is that brands are built over decades, not months. Most of your sales today are down to advertising you did ten years ago. (Yes, this doesn’t stop agencies making inflated claims of commercial effectiveness in their case studies, but it doesn’t mean you should mirror them when it comes to the consequential issue of climate.)

This is more than just batting numbers around—it has effects in the real world. A casual reader would understandably think ‘If only we could stop this one Audi campaign, we’d be making a massive dent in global carbon emissions!’ An Audi marketing manager might even choose to scale back their activity and claim a Uganda-sized positive result in their annual sustainability report. None of it connects to reality—it barely affects an ounce of carbon in the air, and it creates a false idea of progress to suggest it does.

The Guardian editorial links to another article, also published yesterday, that repeats the Audi/Uganda claim and goes further:

“Similar trends are evident in the air travel industry. More than half of Delta Air Lines’ approximately $151m ad spend from October 2022 to October 2023, for example, was spent advertising long-haul flights, encouraging travellers to rack up air miles to use for more travel, and pushing upgrades to premium classes, although the airline also spent tens of millions of dollars to advertise its commitment to “sustainable aviation fuels”.

Who is Delta Airlines’ ad agency, specifically for long haul flights? Ah, it’s Iris Worldwide. No wonder they think advertising is so ‘awful’. Presumably they will also resign their accounts for Bentley’s luxury SUVs, Jeep, Mini, VW, Volvo and Lamborghini.

I can already hear the response: OK, it’s easy to call hypocrisy—at least they’re doing something good with that Simon Amstell ad.

Are they?

First, I see Iris Worldwide selfishly undermining the industry that pays them, and letting down countless industry colleagues as a result—not to mention their own clients and their marketing departments. The ad feeds a simplistic “Ads bad! Touch grass!” narrative that does a disservice to many in the industry who create ads that boost the economy on which livelihoods depend, alert people to important charitable and social causes, and fund climate change documentaries. You could insert a single line in that Simon Amstell script that would at least make it more interesting: “On the other hand, I helped fund this programme. Crap, it’s complicated isn’t it?”

Second, I see Iris and Purpose Disruptors feeding a narrative that climate action must always be associated with guilt, deprivation and not having nice things. And its tone must always be one of condescending elitism: You need to go out and spend more time in nature! says the script from the ad agency that writes all the other ads. Oh yeah, what do you need to do? a viewer might reply. I’ve just sat down after another day as a nurse / teacher / construction worker / delivery driver / job seeker… I’ve just got the kids to bed, bought them a few presents online, done the supermarket shop without which we’d all keel over and die. Now you want me to go out into nature? It’s 9pm. Shall I see you in the local woods? Can I buy a torch off Amazon Prime first?

Even for an audience watching a climate change documentary, it’s an expensive missed opportunity. And it doesn’t have to be like that. Climate action can be aspirational: cleaner air, nicer cities, cooler cars, cheaper energy bills. Ad agencies could have made solar panels and water butts cool by now—where are those ads? Ad agencies with a 30-second slot in peak time could use it to say something useful: support this charity, donate to this cause, buy this green product. Instead, it’s promoting a self-referential hashtag that garnered almost zero interaction on Twitter—I could find only one post, complaining that the ad wasn’t deaf-aware, which isn’t unreasonable.

Purpose Disruptors is a strange organisation. Despite its .org web address, usually associated with non-profits, it appears to be a standard limited company. But it has been the recipient of large grants. As far as I can see, they include £550,810 from the JJ Charitable Trust in 2021, and a further £332,000 in 2022—amounts much larger than any other grant the Trust made in the same years. The KR Foundation also made a grant of DKK 3,734,286 in 2021, which amounts to about £436,000.

That’s an incomplete picture, because other funders are mentioned on the Purpose Disruptors website—and it’s on top of money they make from workshops and training. But it’s already well over a £1m in funding for a company that employs a handful of people. What’s this money producing? Unreliable research and ineffective ads? Maybe advertising journalists could look into it, instead of making the Simon Amstell ad their ‘Ad of the day’.

I’ll end this post with an ad I wrote recently for the Antarctic Science Foundation, which does important work to establish a scientific basis for climate change predictions and interventions. (I’ve gravitated towards non-profit work in recent years, but largely through happenstance rather than high-mindedness, and I’ve done my share of work for less wholesome people too.)

If anyone from Channel 4 is reading, 30 seconds of airtime would be greatly appreciated. And if Simon Amstell is reading, maybe you can make a donation—and remember it was an ad that encouraged you to do it.

---

Thanks for reading—I’m working on that book I announced, and hope it’ll be ready early next year. For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. Thoughts on Writing uses language as a way into wider cultural and political issues.