17653: On The Publicis Groupe Versus WPP Exclusivity Exhibition.

Advertising Age spotlighted the spat between Publicis Groupe and WPP, whereby the France-based White holding company called out Cindy Rose, CEO of the UK-based single White operating company, for her commentary on major brands assigning global business to White holding companies sans traditional pitches.

The Publicis Groupe rebuttal felt like admansplaining—although former Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Maurice Lévy would undoubtedly deny it.

The volleying vomit displays hypocrisy and hubris.

After all, holding companies were arguably designed to secure business in unconventional—accent on con—style. The model allows for cronyism, Corporate Cultural Collusion, and constructing companies for exclusive client catering.

Publicis Groupe and WPP—as well as all holding companies—have engaged in account acquisition schemes leveraging privileged power plays. And there’s no sign of anyone returning to traditional pitching.

The back-and-forth bickering is bona fide bullshit.

Let the White holding company without Prime Redlining practices cast the first stone.

Publicis fires back at WPP CEO Cindy Rose over comments on agencies winning business without traditional pitches

By Brian Bonilla

Publicis Groupe is firing back at WPP CEO Cindy Rose over comments she made about agencies winning business without traditional pitches with an unusually pointed Instagram post that accuses its rival of insulting clients. It also takes a swipe at WPP’s decision not to defend Coca-Cola’s North American media account.

In the “Dear Cindy” post, addressed directly to Rose, Publicis challenges her suggestion during WPP’s third-quarter earnings call last week that agencies winning business without competitive pitches could be encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence. The French holding company, which has secured several major accounts this year without formal reviews, argued in the post that clients are subjecting agencies to extensive evaluations even when they forgo traditional pitches.

“Although it might make for a good headline, claiming we win on a ‘CEO handshake’ is an insult to clients’ intelligence,” Publicis wrote. “We all know global companies don’t hand over their data, media, and tech keys over a friendly espresso. It takes months of hard testing by marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement teams.”

Rose made the comments in question during WPP’s earnings call, after an analyst asked about the company’s decision not to participate in Coca-Cola’s North American media review and whether WPP was seeing competitors win assignments without pitching. Rose described the trend as the “pitchless CEO handshake thing” and acknowledged the growing costs associated with agency reviews, but warned against dispensing with formal pitches.

“Nobody loves pitching,” she said on the call. “The cost and burden of the process seems to be increasing. But I think what’s really important, to me is that my clients fully understand the implications of the decisions they’re making. These are really high-stakes decisions with material business consequences, and they deserve careful consideration. I don’t think we do ourselves any favor as an industry of professionals by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence.”

Earlier last month, Publicis Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun spoke about the growing trend of marketers handing over accounts without a formal pitch process. Publicis won PepsiCo and Microsoft business this year without a pitch.

In the post, Publicis Groupe also took a shot at WPP for declining to defend Coca-Cola’s North American media business—which Omnicom eventually secured—while focusing on pitching its global media business. In the WPP earnings call, Rose explained: “We made a tough call between spending yet another six weeks pitching for North America versus delivering against what we had already won.”

“You can’t be a passionate defender of pitch culture and plead exhaustion in the same breath,” Publicis wrote in response. “If an extra six-week run was enough to sideline your teams, it’s not an endurance problem; it’s a capability one.”

WPP was not immediately available to comment on the Publicis post.

Read Publicis’s full letter below:

Dear Cindy,

We’ve had a busy few days, as you may have seen, but of course we didn’t miss your earnings call last week.

We’ve always enjoyed a bit of industry back and forth, à la Maurice and Martin, so we couldn’t let your theory on how we win new business slide without a word.

Although it might make for a good headline, claiming we win on a “CEO handshake” is an insult to clients’ intelligence.

We all know global companies don’t hand over their data, media, and tech keys over a friendly espresso. It takes months of hard testing by marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement teams. So let’s be really clear here: skipping an old-school pitch circus isn’t skipping due diligence. It’s clients knowing what they need and testing us to the limit.

Having worked at one of the companies that chose us this year, you know its leaders really well, and your comments sell them remarkably short. They would never have entrusted us with a task of this magnitude on a wink and a handshake.

It’s as believable as saying your troops were too tired to try and win back your biggest client’s biggest market. You can’t be a passionate defender of pitch culture and plead exhaustion in the same breath. If an extra six-week run was enough to sideline your teams, it’s not an endurance problem; it’s a capability one.

Take it from us, investing in tech and talent really helps on that front.

Because in the real world, enterprise partners aren’t chosen after a cosy tête-à-tête or legacy slide decks. They are chosen on connected identity and media solutions, intelligent creativity, and AI engines that drive business.

Don’t get us wrong. We didn’t expect a basket of muffins or a thank-you note for clearing the path to your global renewal. We understand the pressure of building a narrative for the financial markets and the urge to celebrate a win – a victory lap is fun even when you’re the only one who ran. But it shouldn’t require denigrating our clients, our people, and all of our efforts.

Our industry does extraordinary work. Let’s give it the credit it deserves.

Very best,

Your friends at Publicis 

17593: On Zapping Callaway And Good Good Golf.

Adweek published more seemingly self-promotional schadenfreude from the Chief Marketing Officer of Zappi, who threw her sanctimonious soapbox at Callaway and Good Good Golf for their misogynistic marketing.

The author made one semi-insightful point: “The problem is that the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Brands are producing more content, across more platforms, with more partners, for more audiences. The old model of heavily researching a few major campaigns wasn’t built for hundreds of smaller decisions.”

This is followed by shameless self-promotion, as the CMO presents Zappi AI services as capable of screening content quickly and efficiently.

There are key flaws in the proposal.

First, the old model never heavily researched a few major campaigns—at least not through a culturally competent lens. Indeed, work was evaluated with an exclusive, predominately White perspective.

Second, AI has already been called out for its cultural cluelessness. The real problem in this area involves technology and algorithms created with an exclusive, predominately White perspective.

Third, the root problem—which Adland has absolutely failed to address for at least 75 years—is the global DEIBA+ issue. That is, White advertising agencies—and companies like Zappi—perpetuate an exclusive, predominately White perspective.

The problem is that the infrastructure is built on systemic racism.

Callaway and Good Good’s Ad Was So Bad, Even AI Audiences Sounded the Alarm

Callaway and Good Good are arguing about approval, but should be arguing about why no process existed to flag the video before it aired

By Nataly Kelly

You know the clip by now. Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoves fellow creator Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reaches for his new Callaway driver. He stands over her and tells her not to touch it.

The ad is gone. So is the partnership. 

Retailers pulled Good Good merchandise, the company withdrew as title sponsor of a PGA Tour event, while Callaway pledged $1 million to organizations working to prevent violence against women in an effort to wash away the controversy. 

And the entire public argument is about approval. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer says the video was produced by Good Good but signed off by Callaway, and that “that approval should have never happened.” 

On Friday morning, Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick broke an 11-year Twitter silence at 3:38 a.m. to accuse Callaway of asking for the ad, approving it, then dropping his company in a “coordinated media blitz.” Asked whether he’d sue, he replied: “Not opposed.”

Both men are addressing the wrong questions. It’s not about who approved the ad; it’s how nobody and no process stopped it before it went live, when the tools to catch the warning signs cost less than the driver they’re selling. 

The story is much bigger than just one terrible ad

We’ve entered a dynamic where brands and creators need each other. Brands need creators to reach communities they can’t, while creators need to monetize their audiences.

That relationship comes with risk, as brands put decades or centuries of hard-earned equity into the hands of culturally nimble third parties, and ask them to translate it for new audiences. That’s inherently risky. It’s also increasingly necessary.

Creators aren’t the problem. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Brands are producing more content, across more platforms, with more partners, for more audiences. The old model of heavily researching a few major campaigns wasn’t built for hundreds of smaller decisions.

An ad so bad even AI frowned upon it

The frustrating thing about the Good Good ad is that the warning signs weren’t particularly difficult to find. We tested the ad after it was pulled, first with U.S. consumers. It performed significantly below advertising norms on appeal, likelihood to drive behavior, brand fit, relevance, believability, and attention.

More telling was the reaction underneath those scores. Nearly one-third said there was something offensive, unpleasant, or disturbing about the ad. Shock was eight times higher than our norm. 

But let’s assume the Good Good and Callaway teams involved didn’t have the time, resources, or know-how to commission a traditional market research study for one piece of creator content. Fair enough. They at least could have tested the ad with AI.

So that’s what we did at Zappi. We ran the creative past 150 AI synthetic respondents trained on real consumer response data. We had answers back in just minutes. The ad received the lowest possible score (1/5) and even synthetic respondents could spot the warning signs about the content of the ad. Its recommendation, in hindsight, is almost unbearable to read: “Soften or clarify the physical moment so it reads as playful rather than awkward.”

Testing with humans allows you to feel the fire and know exactly how hot it was. But AI was a smoke detector that, if it had only been in place, would have told people to look more closely before the brand equity went down in flames.

Now, to be very clear, AI should never be the cultural arbiter deciding what’s acceptable, but when content moves faster than the infrastructure legacy brands have at their disposal, it can be an incredibly helpful early warning system that tells a human when something deserves a second look. 

What brand leaders should take from this

Who’s at fault here? Everybody involved. Who can learn from it? Marketers. Agencies. All of us.

Creator partnerships and the creator economy aren’t going away. Neither is the pressure to produce more content, faster, for increasingly fragmented audiences.

Brands need creators, and creators need brands. Both need better guardrails, frankly, to cover their own (brand) asse(t)s. 

For brands, those guardrails protect hard-earned equity. For creators, they protect the livelihood and audience they’ve spent years building. The lesson isn’t to slow creator marketing down until it resembles traditional advertising. It’s to build processes capable of moving just as fast as the media they’re meant to govern. And in this not-so-new reality, what the Callaway scandal makes clear is that AI already has an important role to play, but that many brands remain behind the curve.

17582: More Zapping Target For Costume Cultural Cluelessness.

 

Adweek published a seemingly self-promotional perspective from the Chief Marketing Officer of Zappi, providing unsolicited advice for Target in the wake of its latest Halloween hijinks.

Pointing to another Target Halloween costume controversy involving Anne Frank insensitivity (depicted below), the piece underscored MultiCultClassics’ recognition that trick-or-treating brings regular trouble to the mega-retailer.

After droning on about data, the author closed with a hopefully unintentionally patronizing statement:

“But no amount of testing can make up for one cold, hard fact. Somebody who could have looked at this costume and immediately seen the problem was either not involved, or wasn’t heard early enough to stop it.”

Um, it’s more likely that nobody creating Target content possesses the cultural competence or authority to make such a call.

In short, the marketing team at Target probably looks like the leadership team at Zappi.

Unsolicited advice for Zappi CMO: People in exclusive glass houses…

A Retailer’s Checklist to Prevent the Next Target Costume Blunder

Target’s repeat offense shows why ‘pull it and apologize’ doesn’t work. Here’s what retailers should actually change.

By Nataly Kelly

In 2020, Target pulled a children’s costume from its website after shoppers pointed out that it evoked Anne Frank. Six years later, the retailer is apologizing again, this time for a children’s Halloween costume that critics said evoked racist minstrel caricatures.

Target responded in typical corporate fashion. It pulled the product, apologized, and promised internal reviews of the situation. But we all know that the veil of proactivity fades in favor of waiting for all of the uproar to blow over. 

When does an apology stop being a checkbox exercise as opposed to a genuine learning moment? 

A massive corporation like Target no doubt has checks, balances, and stage gates for almost everything. And there’s real volume and pressure behind seasonal innovation. 

Target has said some of its strongest recent performance has come in the fall, and nearly 70% of its Halloween assortment this year is new. That’s a lot of innovation moving through an organization quickly. 

One offensive product is a mistake; two is a concerning trend. 

When a similar failure happens again, it raises a harder question: What did the organization actually learn the first time?

The bar is high and teams are stretched thin trying to find ideas that land. Products are tested for risk—things like choking, flammability, sizing, cost. What’s too often disconnected is how an individual product might affect perception of the brand. 

There is no innovation without brand, and no brand without innovation. But the teams tasked with each are often operating separately.

So what should retailers do differently?

Classify products by their potential for brand risk

A costume carries fundamentally different risks than a towel or a blender. Costumes regularly venture into the territory of culture, identity and at times, appropriation. In a Talker Research survey of American parents, 29% said costumes built around cultural stereotypes should be pulled from stores. For anything involving blackface, that number rose to 43%. Some lines are clearer than others. Seasonal deadlines make that scrutiny harder, but also more important. 

Review the whole, not just the parts

Teams need to look at the composite, not just the individual components. In the Target example, a children’s striped bodysuit alone reads as a clown suit. Add a black mesh mask with a snaggletoothed grin. Then add black gloves and a tiny top hat with a flower on the brim. Most companies review the tech pack and never review the photograph of the image, but the photograph is what the customer ultimately sees, and reacts to.

Look closely at consumer signals

Before this conversation exploded on social media, shoppers were already flagging the costume in Target’s own product reviews. That’s the kind of signal companies spend enormous amounts of money trying to find. Another problem is often that the people moderating product reviews don’t talk to the people creating products, and most of those folks are not getting feedback directly from consumers whatsoever. In a hundred-thousand-person company, things fall through the cracks. Consumer research only helps if it can travel horizontally across the organization, and can be accessed quickly enough for every employee making a decision that affects the brand to act on it. At many companies, access to consumer testing is not yet democratized and widely available. 

Address the cultural problems no checklist can solve.

No one wakes up hoping to destroy brand equity and alienate consumers. Companies repeat mistakes when they treat their own response as a project with an end date instead of a system that has to be built and maintained for the long term.

Think about what six years does to an organization the size of Target. The team that felt the heat in 2020 is gone. The vp that commissioned the internal review may have retired. The consultant that curated the design invoiced and moved on. The task force fizzled out not long after the news cycle. And the document with the retro is still sitting in a drive nobody opens under a name that no longer has any relevance. 

That requires better consumer feedback and more connected data. But no amount of testing can make up for one cold, hard fact. Somebody who could have looked at this costume and immediately seen the problem was either not involved, or wasn’t heard early enough to stop it.

Target will recover, and eventually the news cycle will move on, as it goes. But while consumers can look past a mistake, it’s very hard to undo how a brand made them feel. The goal shouldn’t be to get better at apologizing. It’s to build an organization that remembers why it had to apologize in the first place, and keeps the next embarrassing mea culpa from happening.

17529: On Trust, Distrust, And Mistrust At WPP.

More About Advertising spotlighted troubles at WPP Media, including:

 

• The former head of WPP’s media operation in China received a life imprisonment sentence for charges stemming from a $176 million scam—and two others were also hit with stiff sentences.

 

• The former head of a GroupM division in New York City filed a ‘whistleblower’ lawsuit, charging he was fired for raising red flags that WPP’s trading division illegally retained profits that should have been passed back to clients.

 

Additionally, there’s a class-action lawsuit filed by shareholders charging WPP with deceptively sugarcoating profits last year.

 

It all makes for bad optics, especially given the single White operating company is restructuring itself as a media-first enterprise.

 

WPP CEO Cindy Rose declared, “We want to be a trusted growth partner for our clients in the era of AI.”

 

The corporate website proclaims, “WPP Is The Trusted Growth Partner For The World’s Leading Brands.”

 

Okay, except WPP displays internal distrust. Media is globally viewed with suspicion and concern by clients. And Adland practitioners are consistently rated among the least-trusted professionals.

 

Trust is earned. So is distrust and mistrust.

 

WPP’s China crisis – why is the holding company so accident-prone?

 

By Stephen Foster

 

Any business handling millions, sometimes billions, of other people’s money on ultra-tight margins is open to fraud, indeed it may be tempted to try itself.

 

The former boss of WPP’s media operation (GroupM) in China has been sentenced to life imprisonment, accused of masterminding a $176m scam. Two others have also received stiff sentences. The Chinese judicial system is hardly famed for its transparency but WPP has been careful to distance itself from the three employees. Its business in China, hardly a surprise, has been hammered.

 

That isn’t the only cloud on the horizon though. Over in NYC there’s what’s being termed a $100m ‘whistleblower’ lawsuit from Richard Foster, one-time head of GroupM’s Motion Content Group (whatever that was) alleging that WPP fired him for raising concerns that WPP’s trading division used client spending power to secure cash rebates and volume-based discounts from media owners, illegally retaining profits rather than passing them back to clients. Ring a bell?

 

Also in NYC, there’s a class action by angry shareholders claiming the company failed to appraise them fully of the collapse in profits last summer which, ultimately, led to the departure of CEO Mark Read. Making overly-optimistic noises can be costly.

 

Finally (and there may of course be more) WPP is involved in a long-running dispute in Kenya with the founder and former CEO of WPP Scangroup Bharat Thakrar alleging that WPP, among other things, has been using Scangroup money to prop up the holding company, to the detriment of Scangroup. It’s redolent of other far-flung WPP disputes including its agencies in Australia.

 

Now WPP may deal with all these issues and emerge smelling of roses but they surely affect its ability to trade its way out of current problems. They must be especially galling for all those people at Ogilvy and VML who have just notched up a stellar Cannes Lions, seemingly doing a great job for their clients despite all the noise (and worse) around them.

 

WPP’s biggest problem – in a competitive field – is debt, around £3bn against a total company value of £2.64bn. New CEO Cindy Rose’s first job is to reverse these positions. But it’s hard to see what else she can sell to do it. It’s already sold out of research (Kantar) and PR (FGS Global) without making much of a dent in the debt. That in itself is something of a puzzle.

 

Then there’s what we might politely called proprietary media trading (or broking), the smokey activity behind many of the above issues, including China where media deals seem to have been carved up in a Shanghai poker game. Almost certainly more such cases will emerge, partly because no-one seems to know whether it’s legal or not. The US courts may help us out.

 

This Cannes Lions should be a turning point for WPP. But there’s still a lot of old baggage lurking in the undergrowth.

17513: On Publicis Groupe Parodying And/Or Promoting Pitch Practices.

Advertising Age published paradoxical propaganda from Publicis Groupe, allowing the White holding company to pitch itself by calling out how White holding companies, White advertising agencies, and White media firms pitch themselves to win pitches.

 

Publicis Groupe took the hypocritical hype a step further via an AI-generated video, overtly selling its suspect AI capabilities.

 

Not mentioned in the faux criticism of pitch practices:

 

1. The exclusivity—ie, White supremacy—holding companies exploit for dominating access to global accounts.

 

2. Prime Redlining maneuvers.

 

Is the Publicis Groupe exposition a harsh critique or a helpful instructional guide?

 

Publicis calls out AI hype and other bad pitch practices as the industry heads to Cannes

 

By Brian Bonilla

 

Publicis Groupe, one of advertising’s most vocal proponents of AI-driven transformation, is heading into the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity with a different message this year: stop overpromising.

 

Its new satirical AI-generated video pokes fun at exaggerated artificial intelligence claims, free creative work and other questionable pitch practices, while also announcing that Publicis will host what Arthur Sadoun, its chairman and CEO, described as the holding company’s largest-ever gathering of clients and investors at the festival.

 

Publicis has spent years positioning itself at the forefront of the ad industry’s AI conversation through investments in data and AI-powered platforms, often using Cannes as a stage to promote new technology initiatives. This year, however, the industry’s third-largest player is using the festival to warn against what it sees as growing issues with how AI is being promoted as an efficiency play rather than one that drives business impact, causing a “race to the bottom,” Sadoun said.

 

“We like to use Cannes as a platform for industry transformation,” Sadoun said. “This year, we want to call out what we think is a very important topic, which is the current compound effect of overpromising on AI, and unsustainable commercial practices in particular in pitches.” He added that the trend is “currently leading to massive job cuts in our industry” as agencies claim “we can do more with AI and, by the way, we can be cheaper.”

 

The video, created by Le Truc, features reenactments of what Publicis executives say are real pitch stories they have heard over the past few years. Situations include agency executives promising clients they can do creative work for free, promising clients a $5 million bonus if they use an agency’s AI platform, cutting staff significantly, or even an instance where a client was promised a chance to go shopping with their favorite fashion designer in Milan if the agency won the client’s business.

 

While stories like this have existed for a long time in the industry, Sadoun said the promise of AI solutions to clients has increased these bad practices. “It is a big problem and, as importantly, this is not what clients want,” Sadoun added. “That’s the point we want to make. Clients are not expecting us … to put fewer people on their accounts. They are expecting us to use our talent and AI to deliver real business results.”

 

The film was designed to make a serious point through humor, said Carla Serrano, chief strategy officer at Publicis Groupe.

 

“We’re making a statement about how we’ve all gone too far and should, at this moment, really temper ourselves a little bit—especially in the pitch and contractual rooms,” she said. The current environment is one in which agencies are engaged in “AI pitch-maxing,” she added, arguing that “it’s time to get off the hype cycle.”

 

Publicis itself has long faced accusations from people in the industry that it wins business through aggressive commercial terms and by offering creative work for free to win media pitches. Asked directly about such criticism, Sadoun rejected the notion that the company’s growth has come at the expense of its business model.

 

“The industry has been saying that we are giving things for free since we became No. 1 in new business in 2017,” Sadoun said. “Since then, we have doubled our EBITDA, increased our revenue by 65%, hired 40,000 people.” He added: “Are we aggressive in what we do in commercial affairs? Of course we are—and everyone else is. But we are trying, as best as we can, to always come up with offers that, first of all, really deliver for clients.”

 

Sadoun pointed to Publicis’ creative business as evidence that the company is not giving away work to win accounts.

 

“We are the only ones growing in creativity, publicly. We are growing 5% when the entire industry is declining,” he said. “To anyone who says that we give creative for free, our answer is simple: we are growing 5% when the rest of the market is declining.”

 

Publicis has even changed its pitch strategy in the past 18 months, Sadoun said, with a focus on convincing clients to do a project and test out AI tools rather than launching formal reviews.

 

“It would be better if it were all about, ‘Let’s solve a business problem right now. Give us six weeks to do it and prove to you how we can help you drive the growth and success that you’re looking for,’” Serrano said.

 

At Cannes, Publicis is set to showcase what its executives said are tangible business outcomes from AI-enabled transformation work. The company plans to hold more than 60 closed-door client sessions across five industry verticals. Last Year, Publicis hosted over 40 sessions.

 

This will include a large session featuring conversations about business transformation with Gülen Bengi, global chief marketing officer of Mars, and Shakir Moin, president of marketing for North America at The Coca-Cola Company, which were two of the biggest accounts Publicis won last year. It will bring together 350 clients and 70 investors under Chatham House rules.

 

“We want to show not only the ups but also the downs, because clients are ready to hear about the downs and, of course, the outcomes that we have delivered through our relationship,” Sadoun said.

 

The gathering marks the first time Publicis has assembled a client-and-investor audience of that scale at Cannes, he said.

 

“We are doing it in a way where we want this to be a real conversation and actually exactly the opposite of prospecting,” Sadoun said. “We have nothing to sell. Actually, we’re going to try to undersell. We’re going to try to touch on the difficulties of what needs to be put in place to achieve the kind of business results that our clients are looking for.”

17448: Earth Day 2026 In Adland.

The theme for Earth Day 2026—Our Power, Our Planet—presents added meanings in Adland.

 

First, the event spotlights industry hypocrisy.

 

MediaPost reported industry advocacy group Clean Creatives published an open letter to executives at Netflix, which is running a review for its media business in Europe, The Middle East, and Africa.

 

Clean Creatives urged Netflix to add “fossil-free procurement” as an eligibility requirement. This would impact possible contenders Omnicom, WPP, and Dentsu, as all have fossil fuel contracts.

 

The Clean Creatives open letter states, “If the agencies pitching for Netflix's business won’t drop fossil fuels, Netflix should drop them.”

 

Stay tuned on that drama.

 

Second, the event spotlights industry exclusivity.

 

Adland arguably takes advantage of White power to dominate the world. That is, White advertising agencies—within holding companies and independent—embrace systemic racism to globally foster inequality.

 

The ruling majority in Adland seemingly declares, “We’ll use our power to rule our planet.”

 

Clean Creatives To Netflix: Pick ‘Fossil-Free’ Ad Agencies

 

By Steve McClellan

 

Industry advocacy group Clean Creatives has published an open letter to officials at Netflix, currently conducting a media agency review in Europe, The Middle East and Africa, urging the company to add “fossil-free procurement” as part of the eligibility criteria for the assignment. 

 

The company’s estimated net media spend for the region is $190 million, according to agency research firm COMvergence. 

 

It’s believed that Omnicom, WPP and Dentsu are vying for the contract and CC notes that following its acquisition of Interpublic, Omnicom now holds 120 “active or recent” fossil fuel contracts, while WPP has 82 and Dentsu 18. 

 

“As creatives, filmmakers, and climate communicators, we are frequently inspired by the stories Netflix tells – and by the investments Netflix has made to tell them responsibly,” the CC letter states.  

 

“Our planet is at a tipping point, not just in terms of our climate, but in our culture. Fossil fuel companies, aided by PR and media agencies, are contributing to a misinformation crisis that is making climate progress harder to achieve. Netflix has invested real resources in decarbonizing its supply chain. But the agency supply chain, where narrative power lives, hasn't been examined.” 

 

It urged the streaming giant to make fossil-free agency procurement an explicit criterion for the current EMEA review and establish it as a standard going forward. CC noted that there are more than 1,500 agencies worldwide that have pledged to refuse fossil fuel clients. 

 

“Choosing one of these pledged agencies is a low-friction, high-return climate action that is consistent with the commitments Netflix has already made,” the letter states. “If the agencies pitching for Netflix's business won't drop fossil fuels, Netflix should drop them.” 

 

Netflix representatives could not be immediately reached for comment.