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It began with Emma Chamberlain. Now Clean Creatives is taking on the rest of the influencer community.
This week, the group released its Creator’s Pledge, which asks them to “decline any future contracts with fossil-fuel companies, trade associations, or front groups.” Previously, the group had been mostly focused on encouraging agencies, like Edelman, to reject working with fossil-fuel clients.
Jacob Simon, associate creative director at Clean Creatives, told us the goal is for creators to cut ties with the fossil-fuel industry, but not necessarily the agencies that work with these clients. Instead, he said, “we want [creators] to be aware of the agencies that are working with fossil-fuel [companies] and open a dialogue with them.”
Clean Creatives worked with six creators from EcoTok Collective, including Gabrielle Langhorn and Kristy Drutman, to get the word out about the pledge. In her post about it, TikToker Carissa Cabrera said that “what we’re doing in the climate movement is working” based on what she described as a “scramble” from Big Oil to pump out influencer campaigns.
“It’s kind of like a natural jump for [fossil-fuel companies] to target creators because creators have so much power and reach—perhaps more than traditional advertising nowadays,” Simon said. “Based on just everything I’ve seen, it’s clear that fossil-fuel companies want the public to see them as doing the right thing and making the planet a better place.”
As influencer marketing has grown in recent years, so too has oil companies’ interest in it: In 2020, Teen Vogue reported that brands like Shell were “increasingly sophisticated in their youth outreach, producing flashy YouTube videos and Instagram pics for their own channels, and recruiting social media influencers to peddle their goods in sponsored posts.”
Last month, an investigation by Novara Media found that “both BP and Shell have been major sponsors of influencers in recent years, funding campaigns that have reached billions of people.”
So far, Simon said Clean Creatives has not approached any of the creators they’ve seen in sponsored posts for fossil-fuel companies about signing the pledge, though he’s hopeful more creators will understand the damage done by those companies as the pledge gains traction and more people sign.
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