by Johan Gustafsson, art director & partner, Differ Agency, Sweden.

Been asked to work on something for a client that doesn’t sit perfectly straight with you? Something like greenwashing? Here’s a story from Johan Gustafsson that might give you the courage to keep your business honest at the very least. And at best, help your client to do better.

If you work in the comms industry and have an ambition to make projects that push the sustainable transition forward, chances are that you sooner or later will realise that your nice little sustainability campaign has been used to greenwash your client’s company.

What can you do? I would suggest you look to the past for inspiration.

In 1965 copywriter, David Herzbrun, and art director, Helmut Krone, worked at DDB, the agency that started the creative revolution in the early ’60s. One of their clients was the car rental company, Avis, which DDB not only had saved from bankruptcy with its campaign, We try harder, but also had made into a threat to the market leader, Hertz. 

The message of the campaign was, “We’re only no. 2, but we try harder to deliver a nice and clean car when you need one” – a courageous strategy in a country that worships winners.

One day, when they rented an Avis car to get to a meeting with their client on Long Island, they found the ashtray in the car full of cigarette butts. Precisely the kind of thing they had promised in previous ads that Avis wouldn’t do.

Helmut put the butts in an envelope and said, ”Let’s do an ad on this”. The headline of the finished ad went, ”The writer of this ad rented an Avis car recently. Here’s what I found,” alongside a photo of the envelope full of butts.

The body copy: 

       ”I write Avis ads for a living. But that doesn’t make me a paid liar. When I promise that the least you’ll get from Avis is a clean Plymouth with everything in perfect order, I expect Avis to back me up. 

      I don’t expect full ashtrays; it’s not like them. 

      I know for a fact that everyone in that company, from the president down, tries harder.

      ”We try harder” was their idea; not mine.

      And now they’re stuck with it; not me.

      So if I’m going to continue writing these ads, Avis had better live up to them. Or they can get themselves a new boy.

      They will probably never run this ad.

Confident, cocky. But then Helmut and David weren’t your ordinary creatives. Helmut had, with copywriter, Julian Koenig, created the classic VW campaign that started the creative revolution and was lauded as the best campaign of the twentieth century by AdAge in 1999. David had written the iconic VW commercial, Snow Plow, that is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. No slouches.

Bob Townsend, the CEO of Avis, hated the ad but agreed to run it in LIFE magazine and instructed his secretary to hide the magazine when it arrived so he never had to see the ad again.

The lesson: If you find that your campaign has been used to greenwash your client’s company – call them out. If the client is sharp enough he or she will thank you for it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

But what if your client doesn’t like to be criticised and fires your asses? No loss, who wants to work for anything less than a great client anyway?

PS. The tagline, We try harder, was written by copywriter, Paula Green, and is still in use 60 years later.