'It's a Moral Issue': Creatives Are Quitting Agencies Over Fossil Fuel Clients

When wildfire smoke turned New York skies orange this summer, Lane Cooper* holed up in their Brooklyn apartment with multiple air filters on high blast, working remotely for PR firm Edelman. Their asthma means air quality indexes above 200 are extremely dangerous. Then, a resource manager asked them to work on the Shell account. They quit a month later. Cooper is one of many ad and PR industry staffers who have left their jobs in recent years due, at least in part, to their employer's work with fossil fuel companies. Adweek spoke with five people who've left agency jobs for roles that better align with their values. As activists call for ad and PR agencies to cut ties with Big Oil, these departures speak to a growing frustration brewing inside these shops. Working on the Shell account was "a hard no for me," Cooper explained. "I would be actively contributing to destroying the world that I want to save." To Repair Brand Image in the Face of Climate Change, Fossil Fuel Companies Turn to Influencers These stories also shed a nuanced light on the complex reality of work culture amid a climate crisis—something that's only likely to grow as more environmentally conscious young people enter the workforce and the impacts of global warming become more severe. "People who are entering the workforce now saw millions of people their age strike for climate in 2018," Duncan Meisel, executive director of activist group Clean Creatives, told Adweek. "They've grown up with this issue, understanding that the fossil fuel companies are opposed to the health and wellbeing of their generation and they just won't [work for them]. It's too important." For Cooper, who left Edelman in August to work as a freelance writer, opting out of the Shell account wasn't welcomed by management. "They were always trying to convince me that I was shooting myself in the foot, in terms of having a future at the company and in my career overall," Cooper said. In response to Adweek's request for comment regarding how these situations are handled, an Edelman spokesperson said: "We maintain open communications with employees and respect and appreciate diverse views. We have a longstanding policy at Edelman that gives every employee the right to decline to work on any account they feel is not in line with their personal beliefs or values, and we fully support their decisions." Several of the names in this story, marked with an asterisk, have been changed due to concerns about professional or legal repercussions. 'It's a moral issue' In 2020, Chris Iwata* had recently started a new job as a senior art director at Dentsu-owned McGarryBowen. When he was first asked to work on the Chevron account, he hoped it'd be a short-lived project. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Many projects were cut or put on pause, and almost all his time went toward the fossil fuel company. "I'm a very purpose-driven creative, so it was kind of ironic that that happened," Iwata explained. Unhappy at work, he began to focus his energy on personal projects to retain his sense of self, he said. "It was really soul-crushing." After about three months working on the oil and gas client, Iwata left the agency for a different shop. "It's a moral issue for me," he said. "It's not why I got into this industry, and I don't want to lie to people with my work." Now, Iwata is fully freelance. "It's been so rewarding because now I actually get to choose what clients to work on," he said. Dentsu declined to comment for this story. Havas Wins Shell Media Account Following Review—and Climate Protests Build it, and they will come Originally from Mexico, Naoma Serna-Zahn moved to the southwestern U.S. for college in the mid-aughts. There, she met her now-husband, settled in a city in the Southwest, and started working with a very small creative and communications agency. The city is deep in oil country, Serna-Zahn explained, and one of the agency's main clients was an oil and gas firm. While she doesn't exactly describe herself as an environmentalist, working with the oil client didn't sit well with Serna-Zahn. Some of the internal communications the agency helped the oil company with had a political bent—including graphics for a party celebrating Donald Trump's 2016 election win. "I can't do this. This feels like I'm killing my soul by doing this," Serna-Zahn remembered thinking. "This is not the kind of work I want to be doing or people I want to be working with." After a couple years at that agency, Serna-Zahn struck off on her own, founding creative branding agency Nuevo Studio in 2018. And despite being surrounded by it, "we do not work with any oil and gas," she said. Instead, her four-person team works primarily with local small business owners. "We're really intentional about who we work with," Serna-Zahn said. "If you're really dodgy and shady, you're not going to like working for me. And I'm definitely not going to work for you." It feels 'a little icky' Shortly after graduating from college in 2017, Kylie Dodge* landed her first full-time gig doing content and PR for a small agency in a midwestern city near her university. "It was an incredible agency, really. They do really great work," Dodge said. "But they also do work for clients that don't align with my values." After a few years at the agency, Dodge said she began to better understand herself and the kind of work she wanted to do. While she enjoyed working on many of her main clients, she was also asked to contribute to projects for a major fossil fuel brand on a semi-regular basis. "We were working with them on sustainability projects, but it still feels a little icky sometimes," Dodge said. "[They're] the reason we need these sustainability projects." In 2022, Dodge left that agency for a different boutique creative communications shop—one that focuses exclusively on purpose-driven clients. "It's just really important to me to be my full self, wherever I'm at," she said. "I just didn't feel like I had that, externally, with the other agency." After a 60-Day Review of Its Roster, Edelman Is Sticking With Polluters—For Now The big spill For Gosia Plewako, the first realization came earlier, in 2010, when she was working for Ogilvy. "I was four months into my new role as an account director on the corporate BP account when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico," Plewako said. "It was a turning point in my career." That experience is what first prompted Plewako to think about climate change as a "personal and existential crisis," she said. "I remember feeling sick to my stomach for Ogilvy's and my team's role in greenwashing on behalf of BP," Plewako expained. "The impact of the accident and the truth about BP's business strategy and priorities that came out afterwards made me reevaluate how I thought about the role of business in society, and confront the alignment of my own work with my values." After Deepwater Horizon, Plewako asked to be taken off the BP account. The following year, she transferred to OgilvyEarth—a since-shuttered sustainability practice within the WPP-owned agency. In 2019, she moved to climate-focused agency Futerra, where she stayed for three years before leaving to go freelance. Adweek reached out to Ogilvy to ask whether this is something it's seen more broadly among its workforce, or whether it has a policy that allows employees to opt out of working with clients they have a moral opposition to. In response, global chief communications officer David Ford said the agency's standard practice is to offer flexibility to any staffers who express personal concerns about working with clients in any specific industries or product areas.