Shell’s green ads have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for not being transparent about majority of its profits from environmentally damaging fossil fuels such as petrol.
The adverts consisted of a poster in Bristol, a TV ad and a YouTube campaign promoting renewable power the oil and gas company provides and its clean energy services, including electric vehicle charging.
The poster claimed, “BRISTOL is READY for Cleaner Energy”.
The TV and YouTube adverts showed a video with a man stating, “In the UK, 1.4 million households use 100% renewable electricity” from the oil and gas company.
Both adverts also contained messaging that “the UK is READY for Cleaner Energy.”
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The ASA concluded that “the ads were misleading, because they omitted significant information about the overall environmental impact of Shell’s business activities in 2022.”
A spokesperson for the oil and gas company, however, stated consumers are “already well aware that Shell produces the oil and gas they depend on today,” and acknowledging its less environmentally friendly activities would be “counterproductive” to the overall green messaging of the campaigns.
While acknowledging this statement, the ASA said that customers are aware that companies in the oil and gas sectors are aiming to dramatically reduce emissions to the climate crisis and “therefore likely to mislead consumers if they misrepresented the contribution that lower-carbon initiatives played, or would play in the near future, as part of the overall balance of a company’s activities.”
Although Shell claims its statement that the nation is “READY” for cleaner energy is a forward-looking statement, the advertising watchdog also labelling this as misleading as it implied that the products in the ads “already comprised a significant proportion of the energy products Shell invested in and sold in the UK, or were likely to do so in the near future.”
Green Party MP Caroline Lucas told The Guardian “fossil fuel giants like Shell can’t greenwash their way out of the climate emergency.
“Their glitzy advertisements can no longer conceal their climate criminal behaviour – polluting the planet, raking in record profits, and sanitising their own image to continue the climate-wrecking cycle.”
