FACT SHEET: WAVEMAKER AND CHEVRON’S MISLEADING CLIMATE COMMUNICATION
Violating human rights. Polluting the climate. Poisoning communities.
Chevron is guilty of all these and more. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched their commercials. For nearly twenty years, Wavemaker, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, has worked to greenwash Chevron’s image and help them spread climate disinformation.
It’s time for Wavemaker, their parent company, WPP, to come clean and stop working with fossil fuels.
If you work at Wavemaker and would like to be a part of our work to build a clean creative industry, join us here:
CHEVRON’S RECORD OF ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
Chevron is one of the world’s largest polluters and worst human rights offenders. Even among Big Oil corporations, Chevron is notorious for their human rights abuses around the world and the harm they’ve done to communities of color in the United States.
Just look at the Amazon. For decades, Chevron has used an army of lawyers to avoid being held accountable for deliberately dumping 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into the northern Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1990, home to over 30,000 Indigenous and rural Ecuadorians. According to ChevronToxico,
“Instead of taking responsibility and trying to remediate their disaster, Chevron has launched a blitz of public relations and massive retaliatory legal actions. The truth is Chevron's actions cause death, cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and reckless destruction of the Amazon.”
In the United States, Chevron has a track record of poisoning and polluting communities of color, while using their political spending to undermine the fight for racial justice. Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, California is a case in point.
More than 80% of the residents of Richmond are people of color. Thanks to Chevron’s pollution, children living in Richmond are hospitalized at twice the rate of neighboring communities and every neighborhood bordering Chevron’s refinery is in the 99th centile for respiratory illness. From 2016-2018 alone, Chevron had 29 air quality violations. In 2018, the company was forced to pay $160 million in fines for violating provisions of the Clean Air Act.
Chevron loves to feature people of color in their advertisements. They even expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But as the case in Richmond shows, they care more about profits, than people. The same is true of their political spending.
A study by Global Witness found that Chevron “gives over four times more campaign funding to US politicians whose civil rights voting records received an “F” from the NAACP. As Drilled News and others have reported, Chevron also has a long history of funding police unions and departments that have contributed to racial injustice. Over the last 14 years, Chevron has given over $1 million to the insurrectionist members of Congress who voted to overturn results of the 2020 election.
Chevron may think of itself as the “human energy company,” but in truth, it’s the “human rights abuse company.” No amount of greenwashing can cover up that truth.
WPP’S WAVEMAKER: CHEVRON’S AGENCY OF CHOICE
For over two decades, Wavemaker, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, has helped Chevron greenwash its image and cover up its climate crimes. In 2019, after a competitive review for its global media business, Chevron decided to keep its $60 million media account with Wavemaker for the next three years.
Their relationship dates back to approximately 2003 when Wavemaker was known as MEC. Wavemaker has placed all sorts of misleading ads for Chevron. Their 2010 advertising campaign “We Agree” consisted of intentionally misleading statements about Chevron’s commitment to the environment, human rights, and climate action, despite the oil giant’s lobbying against all three. The campaign was widely mocked and understood to be a disaster, but the approach continues to this day.
WAVEMAKER’S MISLEADING ADS:
Wavemaker’s 2020 ad “Pasture” talks about Chevron “learning from nature” and investing in projects that “turn farm waste into renewable natural gas.” In reality, as the New York Times recently reported, Chevron is “doubling down on oil and natural gas and investing what amounts to pocket change in innovative climate-oriented efforts.”
Also, that biogas Chevron is talking about? It’s a false solution. Despite claims that these operations reduce greenhouse gas emissions, burning biogas actually releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants including smog-forming chemicals, offsetting other greenhouse gas reductions. It also entrenches factory farms by creating a market for the huge volumes of manure they produce.
In the Wavemaker’s 2020 ad “Butterfly,” Chevron boasts about “the over $1 billion” they’ve spent on “carbon capture projects.”
The ad, which ran on This Week With George Stephanopoulos on ABC, a political talk show, is clearly designed to influence policymakers in DC.
The reality is that Chevron’s investments in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) are “pocket change” compared to their investments in new oil and gas production. Even worse, there’s no evidence that CCS works at scale.
Chevron’s major CCS project, at the Gorgon LNG plant in Australia, has been “a disaster from the beginning” and is now just venting CO2 into the atmosphere.
In 2020, Wavemaker not only engaged in greenwashing Chevron’s image, but also engaged in what writer Mary Heglar calls “woke washing,” attempting to align the company with the values of equality and racial justice.
Wavemaker’s commercials for Chevron often feature people of color, despite their underrepresentation in the oil and gas sector and the harm Chevron causes to black and brown communities.
Wavemaker’s 2020 ad, “Value Everyone,” brags about how Chevron is working with “women and minority owned businesses.” As mentioned above, Chevron has a terrible track record of poisoning Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.
Meanwhile, according to the US Labor Department, only 9% of workers in oil and gas are Black and they make on average 23% less than their white counterparts. Women make up only 16% of the oil and gas workforce.
Other ads pushed by Wavemaker are just a random assortment of inspirational images -- people climbing mountains, looking at the ocean, running -- that are meant to evoke a sense of progress and “human potential.” Their 2020 ad “only human” talks about Chevron’s work to “create new solutions” and “to help meet the needs of people on this planet in affordable, reliable and ever cleaner ways.”
In reality, Chevron has lobbied against climate solutions and attempted to block the expansion of renewable energy which is more affordable, just as reliable, and much, much cleaner than Chevron’s oil and gas.
IT’S TIME FOR WAVEMAKER TO MAKE BETTER WAVES.
Wavemaker’s ads for Chevron aren’t designed to sell a product, but to market an idea: that Chevron is an ally of climate action, even as it works to block progress. That Chevron cares about minority communities, even as it pollutes and poisons them.
The ads’ placement on major political talk shows reveal their real purpose: to convince lawmakers and opinion-makers that there is no need to regulate Chevron, because they’re already hard at work on solutions.
This is a lie. And it’s time for Wavemaker to stop telling it.
Wavemaker’s parent company WPP says that it is deeply committed to climate action. It even features pictures of Indigenous people on its sustainability webpage. WPP has also committed to “use our creativity, our scale and our influence to make a difference in the fight against racism.” Wavemaker’s US CEO, Amanda Richman, has expressed her personal commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, saying we need to “hear from our black community and people of color in general.”
Wavemaker’s work with Chevron makes a mockery of these commitments.
We think that’s time for Wavemaker to come clean and ditch their work with Chevron and all other fossil fuel corporations and trade associations. The talented creatives at Wavemaker deserve to work on accounts that help fight climate change, not make it worse. They should get to use their skills to help lift up Indigenous peoples and communities of color, not cover up how corporations like Chevron are harming them. And we imagine that some of Wavemaker’s other major clients, like Ikea and Netflix, want to work with an agency that’s helping protect our climate and communities, not helping wreck them.
Wavemaker, stop working with fossil fuels. Become a Clean Creative today.