‘Better to be inside the tent’: Reasons for working with fossil fuel

Rupert Price is well aware he was invited on stage at Mumbrella’s Commscon last Thursday to be “the villain in the piece.” As chief strategy officer of DDB Group, Sydney, he was part of a lively panel discussion that tackled the question: ‘Is big fossil fuel the next big tobacco?’

“We have some fossil fuel clients and some other clients that probably have some morally questionable commercial intentions,” Price admits, although he stresses that working with such clients isn’t “a decision that we would necessarily make today”.

“There’s a couple of factors at play here,” he says, singling out ExxonMobil as an example of a fossil fuel client. “One is it’s a legacy issue, so they’ve been in the UK for many, many years, so this is an issue that’s evolved.” The other is that, given their lot — it’s a multi-national client of an international corporate — his local team chooses to effect change from within.