Are we teaching creatives to greenwash?

Give a creative a modest product benefit, and we’ll find a way to make you question how you ever lived without it.

After all, that’s literally our job. 

A better photograph, a sharper line, the perfect soundtrack. Suddenly, something you hadn’t thought about five minutes ago feels like something you absolutely can’t remember life without.

I spent more than 20 years working in fashion, beauty and advertising. I loved the craft, the collaboration, the sheer challenge and adrenaline of crafting that perfect shot, the dopamine hit after creating another masterpiece.

Around 12 years ago, I started asking myself some uncomfortable questions about what my creative talent was fuelling beyond the campaigns I was shooting. 

If the work I felt proudest about was persuading people to buy more stuff they didn’t need, what did that mean beyond just a(nother) brief and stunning content? And what was actually happening behind the curtains of the images I was shooting?

Once you start asking yourself those questions, it’s hard to go back to discussing the next shot.

That curiosity eventually took me into sustainability and led to co-founding Do Epic Good with Ramzi Moutran. It also changed how I look at a creative brief. Because some of the instincts that make us epic at our jobs can make us very good at accidental greenwashing.

As creatives, we’re trained to find the strongest insights, to focus on the emotional connection, and deliver our messaging in a unique and totally brilliant way, never to have been seen before.

Then a sustainability brief lands, and we use exactly the same skills. Except the detail we may cut because it’s too expensive or clunky might be the detail that makes the claim honest.

Picture a shampoo bottle made with some recycled plastic.

Genuinely worth talking about. Now add a misty forest, a golden hour, and a warm voiceover that makes you feel like you’re drinking a glass of milk and honey before bed. What does the audience walk away with? Not a ‘nice bottle’. They walk away believing the shampoo has basically been created by Mother Nature herself! And that they’re doing something good for the planet.

The evidence was about the bottle. The creative has endorsed and elevated the whole product. And nobody had to write a false sentence for that to happen.

As of September 27th 2026, the rules are catching up with this. The EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (otherwise known as the EmpCo Directive) tightened the requirements for marketing to EU consumers. It bans generic claims such as ‘eco-friendly’ unless you can prove recognised excellent environmental performance. It also means one greener bottle can't be used to paint the whole product, or the whole company, green. 

For creatives, there’s a particularly telling detail: the directive explicitly recognises that words combined with colours, imagery or sound can create a generic environmental claim. So the ‘but we never actually said that’ argument is not going to rescue you when the entire execution is busy suggesting it.

We know images carry meaning. We build entire campaigns around that fact. 

So we can’t suddenly treat them as decoration when someone asks whether an environmental message is misleading.

And if you’re based in the UK and feeling smug, don’t. Not only can the CMA fine businesses up to 10% of their annual turnover for misleading consumers, but if you’re selling to EU consumers, the EmpCo Directive affects you too.

I understand the pressure here. The client wants a confident story, and the team wants to win a Lion.

We need to ask the awkward questions early. It's considerably less painful than asking it once the campaign goes live.

So what should we do differently?

Start by getting properly nosy about the evidence. 
What has changed? Which part of the product does the claim cover? Compared with what? Is this something the business has achieved, or something it hopes to achieve? ‘More sustainable’ might look lovely on the briefing slide, but it still needs explaining. You don’t need to become a climate scientist overnight, but you do need access to someone who understands the evidence.

Then try an audience test. 
Show the work to someone who hasn’t spent three weeks inside the brief. Ask what they think the brand is promising. Let them answer before you explain what you meant. If they hear ‘planet-friendly product’ and you can only substantiate ‘less plastic in the packaging’, you have useful information. Rework the idea.

Look at the qualifications, too. 
If the headline needs a tiny paragraph underneath it to undo the impression it creates, that paragraph deserves a bigger role at the creative table. People experience an ad at a glance. They don’t arrive armed with your supporting deck.

There’s also a management job here. 
Teams need permission to challenge a claim, including when the person doing the challenging is the most junior person in the room. You can’t ask for responsible work while making every question feel like a threat to the brief.

For me, the interesting creative challenge is making a specific, honest win feel compelling.

Can we make people care about a better bottle without suggesting we’ve fixed the beauty industry? Can we tell an engaging story about progress while being transparent about the journey we are on and what still needs work?

I think we can. Specifics give us something real to work with: a material, a process, a decision, a change. There’s often a more interesting story there than another generic promise to save the planet.

I still want to make work that gets noticed.

I just want us to be equally curious about what people believe after they’ve noticed it.

Before the next sustainability campaign leaves the studio, ask: what will someone take away from this—and can we prove it?

Then use all that lovely creative talent to make the answer as aspirational and beautiful as every other campaign. Because this is how we change the conversation. .