Cannes Lions… full of rosé-fuelled networking sessions, yacht parties for advertising bigwigs, and (in recent years) a chance to shine a light on creative advertising with a planet-positive agenda. But this year, whilst the glamorous events were as prevalent as ever… critics feel there was a HUGE slip-up on the sustainability side. 

Coca-Cola (the World’s biggest plastic polluter) was named the 2024 Cannes Lions Creative Brand of the Year, for their ad Recycle Me - which ‘aimed to remind consumers that sustainability is a collective responsibility’. Ad critics are calling it ‘laughable’. Consumers are calling it ‘outrageous’. It’s time to Dish the Dirt…

DOES CANNES CARE ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY?

Since the Summer of 1954, the best and brightest of the advertising industry have been attending the Cannes Lions Festival to celebrate the best ads in the biz.

Whilst sustainability wasn’t really on the judges radar in the early years, 2015 saw the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals- which meant that the judges had to include sustainability in their general judging criteria.

In the past few years, several of the winning ads showcased innovative approaches to tackling environmental issues, in addition to lots of conversations around the sustainability of the festival itself – with the board claiming to be trying to reduce their carbon emissions and single-use plastics. 

THE CONTROVERSIAL COCA-COLA AD

This year's entry from Coca-Cola was their first Cannes Lions win in 10 years… which is a huge deal. It’s a pretty simple ad, showing the Coca-Cola logo after a can has been crushed during the recycling process with the words “Recycle Me” (from the right side of the can) underneath. Whilst the graphics are pretty cool… hearing quotes like 'a brand’s logo is usually untouchable, so altering it is extremely bold’ and hearing the producers thank their ‘brave clients Coca-Cola’ for just an out-of-the-box ad feels a little ridiculous.

Coca-Cola is the biggest plastic polluter in the world. It owns over 500 brands, sells more than 200,000 plastic bottles every minute, and has a reputation for making pledges that they have no intention of actually achieving (in fact… they’ve never actually achieved even one of their sustainability pledges - even the ones made back in 1990). 

For a sustainability-focused ad from Coca-Cola to even be in the running for a Cannes Lions Grand Prix award, after Cannes Lions have claimed to take the company’s sustainability into consideration, is pretty shocking. On top of this, climate activists have even pointed out that a lot of recyclers ask consumers to NOT crush cans - as this can confuse the sorting machines and cause batch contamination.

But the biggest issue ad critics have taken with the advert is its ‘purpose’. Coca-Cola has announced that the aim of this ad was to ‘remind consumers that sustainability is a collective responsibility’... aka completely shifting the blame away from themselves. Ad critics are calling it laughable that rather than actually finding a solution better than recycling (like a bottle return scheme) they’d prefer to spend extortionate amounts of cash putting the emphasis on where the customer is ‘doing wrong’.

Whilst this isn’t technically greenwashing (as the cans are recyclable) it’s being called Green Shifting – a company aiming to look more sustainable, whilst actually just moving the responsibility of change onto somebody else.

SO WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

The good news is that well-known ad critics are not shying away from a fight – publishing articles explaining this scandal and trying to engage the sustainability community online. The not-so-good news is that, compared to Coca-Cola and Cannes Lions, these critics and climate activists have a pretty small platform. If you search Coca-Cola Cannes Lions on Google – the first page of results is taken over by press releases from the ad agency that produced it and Cannes Lions’ winner announcements.

Seeing as we almost certainly won’t be seeing the prize retrospectively taken back, all we can do is hope that the Cannes Lions nominations team is seeing the feedback from within the industry, as well as from the public, and that with future nominations sustainability will actually be taken into account. Only the future will tell… and we’ll be here to Dish the Dirt