1,321 fossil-fuel contracts: your client list is now your positioning

Clean Creatives' latest F-List counts 1,321 contracts between the fossil fuel industry and advertising and PR agencies, the highest number since its annual research began in 2021. The report will be read as a climate story, and I think the more useful reading for agency leaders is about positioning: an agency's client list is now public, and where it disagrees with the credentials deck, the list wins.

This is not a climate lecture. Whether an agency should work for an oil major is a decision for its owners, and plenty will make it with their eyes open. What interests me is the gap between what agencies say they stand for and what their rosters say, and how few of them are managing it.

The list has become the evidence

The numbers are specific enough to be uncomfortable. Omnicom recorded the highest holding-company count, at 118 contracts. WPP followed with 88. Publicis recorded 34. On the other side of the ledger, more than 1,650 agencies worldwide have signed the Clean Creatives pledge to refuse contracts from fossil fuel organisations.

Put those two figures side by side and you can see the actual shift. A client roster used to be private information, released selectively through credentials decks and case studies. It is now compiled by third parties, published annually and attributed agency by agency, for anyone who cares to look. That includes the graduate choosing between two offers, the procurement lead building a longlist, the journalist writing the follow-up and the AI engine answering a question about your agency.

None of those readers can see your values from the inside. They can see who pays you.

Where the gap shows

Most agencies have a positioning statement that talks about purpose or sustainability. Many wrote it sincerely. Very few have checked it against their own client list, line by line, the way an outsider now will.

The problem is rarely hypocrisy. It is inattention. The positioning was written by the founders in a workshop. The client list was built by new business over a decade, account by account, each decision reasonable at the time. Nobody owned the comparison, so nobody made it.

Whatever your positioning statement claims, your client list is the version of it other people believe.

Talent reads it first, usually before accepting an offer rather than after. Clients read it next, particularly the ones with climate commitments of their own to answer for. Journalists read it when they need a second paragraph.

Clean Creatives' head of research, Nayantara Dutta, says agencies are "nowhere close to giving up their fossil fuel contracts". That may well be true. It also means the list will be longer next year, better documented, and read by more people.

Both answers are defensible. Having no answer is not.

I am not arguing that every agency should sign the pledge. An agency that works for energy companies, says so plainly and has a considered view on why can hold that position. So can an agency that refuses the work and builds its brand on the refusal. Both are positions. Both can be defended in a pitch, a trade interview or a graduate assessment day.

What cannot be defended is the agency whose website says one thing and whose roster says another, and which discovers the contradiction when a reporter rings. That agency has no position on the question at all. It has an exposure. And "we don't discuss our clients" now reads as an answer in itself.

The same logic runs well beyond energy. Gambling, defence, fast fashion, the political client somebody took on as a favour. Every sector with a reputational edge produces the same test: whether what you publish about yourself survives a reader who has your client list open in another tab.

The work is in the comparison

Read your roster the way a sceptical graduate would. Read your positioning the way a journalist would. Where they disagree, decide which one changes, and say so before someone else says it for you. A positioning statement that cannot survive that comparison is still a draft.

Clean Creatives' executive director, Laura Ranzato, frames it as agencies facing "a real choice". For most agencies the real choice is less dramatic than the report implies. It is simply whether to make the decision deliberately or have it made for them by whoever compiles the next list.

The agencies that come out of the next few years well will be the ones whose stated position and client list tell the same story, whichever story that is.

If yours currently tell two, that is worth a conversation.