Inside Job - Glimpse Glimpse

Most young creatives are seriously worried about climate change.

But when they get their first job at an agency, they’re often told to make ads for fossil fuel companies.

They feel powerless.

Like they have no voice.

Imagine a world where...
Young creatives changed their industry from within

Inside Job was a two year campaign to encourage young creatives to make themselves heard on climate change.

We used creativity and satire to point out the absurdity of agencies working for fossil fuels while also pretending to be sustainable.

Here’s what we did:

The Brief Sabotage Handbook

We created a radical pamphlet for staff at agencies with fossil fuel clients – including Ogilvy and Wunderman Thompson.

The handbook explained how to ‘wreck a brief’ from the inside – by blowing the budget on poke bowls and freaking out the legal team.

We handed out over 300 copies during our al-fresco brainstorm, along with pencils with ‘Do Bad Work’ written on them.

We got tons of coverage across the industry press, and we’ve heard the handbook is still being furtively passed around creative teams with grubby fingers.

Note To Self

We asked students from some of the top creative courses in the UK to send a message to their future self.

When it comes to climate change, could they persuade themselves not to ditch their values as they get more senior?

Over 500 students took part, and we expected a bunch of posters or handwritten letters. Instead we received an incredible array of work from sandcastles to perfumes, flags and piggybanks.

With help from our friends at It’s Nice That, we showed some of the best entries at a pop-up exhibition in Shoreditch.

Use your influence

Working with our friends at Desmog, we uncovered a worrying new trend.

Oil and gas companies are now paying social media influencers to hide the truth about their dirty business.

So we teamed up with comedian Will Hislop and creative hotshots Alice & Lara to make short films that told the story in unexpected (and sometimes gross) ways.

The result was millions of views, press coverage everywhere, and a gentle dunking for influencers who use their profile to shill for Shell.

Atmospheric

These days, most advertising agencies don’t want to admit that they work with fossil fuel clients.

It’s almost like they’re embarrassed about promoting the most polluting industry on earth.

Introducing Atmospheric, the world’s first agency that’s loud and proud about its work for big oil.

We created this spoof agency and used it to pitch for Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest fossil fuel giant.

In collaboration with Oli Frost and The Utopia Bureau we created a website, pitch deck, billboards and a fictional CEO who quickly became a real LinkedIn influencer.

This was a staggeringly complicated satire which is far too complicated to describe in words. So watch this film instead.

Biting Satire

Over the two years of this campaign we learned that humour and satire is incredibly effective at bursting the industry’s bubble, and getting young creatives talking.

We’ve now handed this work over to Oli Frost and the new team at Serious People, so the world could (probably) not be in safer hands.