A group of senior advertising executives has released an anonymous memo warning that “a vacuum of responsible leadership” means the ad industry is morally failing itself and society.

“We know our industry is funding hate, legitimising environmental destructive companies, and working at the frontline of a US-led rollback on diversity, equity and inclusion” (known as DEI), they said in the memo, while “paying little more than lip service to solving critical issues” that include “spreading hateful content” and “helping polluting industries such as oil and gas rebuff public scrutiny.”

Many of the advertising and public relations industry’s headquarters and biggest clients are located in the United States.

The insiders called for an “honest conversation with industry’s power holders” such as agency leaders, the industry press, and advertising trade bodies, which they say are “failing to make a material stand on any of the issues that would give our industry a moral justification for existing alongside a commercial one.”

Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of the industry group Conscious Advertising Network, said that the memo is “a warning shot to both the C-Suite and investors in the advertising industry as well as the brands that use them.

“People [in the industry] are not happy and they will not roll over on the issues that matter to them,” said Kingaby.

The memo was written by at least 15 executives from some of the world’s most significant ad agencies, some of whom have over 20 years experience, according to Inside Track, the UK-based group that co-ordinated the memo.

“This memo shows the deep sense of frustration being felt by senior leaders in advertising,” said Ned Younger, director at Inside Track.

‘Hollowing Out of Values’

The memo’s release comes at a time of unprecedented turbulence for the global advertising industry.

Clients are being tight-fisted with their marketing budgets amid geopolitical and economic instability, even as the intermediary role of traditional ad agencies is being squeezed out by advertising tools offered by social media platforms, tech companies, and consultancies.

Growth has slowed for most of the five big holding companies, which dominate the industry with their hundreds of subsidiary agencies around the world: London-based WPP, New York-based Omnicom, Tokyo-based Dentsu, and Publicis and Havas, both headquartered in Paris.

Meanwhile, the industry’s adoption of artificial intelligence and Omnicom’s $13.5 billion acquisition of New York-based rival Interpublic Group (IPG) have driven thousands of job losses as agencies look to cut costs.

These pressures are accelerating “a hollowing out of the values…that most in our industry hold dear,” the whistleblowers stated.

“I continue to believe that advertising can be a positive force within the world,” said one member of the group, who declined to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “But increasingly it feels like the checks and balances that can make that true are being undermined by leaders I cannot trust to respond effectively and responsibly.”

The claim is a reference to a perceived rollback on public commitments made by major agencies to reduce the industry’s climate-heating pollution, as well as DEI initiatives to increase staff from groups that have been historically discriminated against, marginalized, and under-represented in the industry.

In March 2025, The Guardian reported that WPP had cut all references to DEI in its 2024 annual report, down from 20 mentions the previous year, and DeSmog revealed that WPP ad agency AKQA had quietly closed its sustainability-focused arm Bloom.

Three agencies within the Havas network lost a social impact business accreditation known as “B-Corp” in 2024, after another Havas agency, Havas Media, signed a multi-million dollar contract to handle buying ad space for oil giant Shell.

All five of the big holding groups are publicly-listed companies. Richard Wielechowski, a senior investment analyst at Planet Tracker, said “the issues raised in this memo highlight a clear material risk” for investors.

“As a service industry, staff dominate the cost base for the ad agencies,” said Wielechowski. “Our research highlights that if agencies fail to address environmental or social concerns linked to their activities or clients, higher staff churn could materially impact revenues, costs and long-term profitability.”

Dentsu, Havas, Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP, did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk vs. the Advertising Industry

The anonymous group say this trend away from outwardly progressive initiatives echoes the very public war that the current United States government is waging against such efforts.

President Trump ordered all federal DEI programmes to shut down on his first day back in office, and has demanded that businesses as well as federally-funded entities such as universities end their own DEI initiatives.

Under Trump, climate denial has become official U.S. policy: The Biden-era landmark climate action law has been crippled, and federal climate research and programmes have been gutted. His administration is also seeking to overturn the legal basis for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions as pollution.

The whistleblowers also pointed to the influence of big tech and social media companies — where brands increasingly spend their advertising budgets compared to traditional routes such as TV and billboards — in pushing back on attempts to reform the industry.

Industry initiatives designed to stop brands from funding harmful content — such as hate speech or online scams — have fallen to pressure from both social media giants and the U.S. government over the last two years.

Industry trade group the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) shut down its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) in 2024, after social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, sued the group and WFA members including Unilever and Mars for unlawfully conspiring to boycott X by no longer advertising on the platform.

Initiatives such as GARM set guidelines for brands on where to buy ad space so that their ads do not appear next to, and in turn monetize, harmful content.

Online content watchdogs including Media Matters flagged increasing amounts of such content appearing on X after Musk stripped back the platform’s content moderation teams following his purchase of the company in 2022.

Musk’s X sued Media Matters for defamation in 2023. Both cases are ongoing.

The U.S. government appears to have backed Musk in his war against the advertisers and advertising groups taking a stance on harmful content. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission only accepted the merger of Omnicom and IPG, which was completed in November, on the condition that the newly-formed company did not choose where to buy advertising space based on “specific political or ideological viewpoints”.

IPG may also have suspended publication of its annual Media Responsibility Index, which rated online platforms such as X on their content safety guidelines. The index was regarded as a powerful tool in encouraging social media platforms to improve their safety standards in return for ad spend from major IPG clients such as Nike.

IPG did not release a new Media Responsibility Index in 2025, but has not publicly announced that it was ending the initiative.

Omnicom (into which IPG has now merged) did not respond when asked why it did not release its Media Responsibility Index in 2025.

‘Lip Service’

The group’s memo acknowledged that there are individuals working hard to address the industry’s negative impacts on society.

However, the whistleblower-executives said, most industry forums on issues such as sustainability or digital safety, are “paying little more than lip service” to solving these problems.

Ad Net Zero, a voluntary emissions-reduction initiative that counts most of the world’s biggest ad agencies and media platforms among its signatories, has been criticised for not requiring its members to consider the climate impact of creating campaigns for major polluters.

The memo also called out the influence of the numerous advertising awards that take up much of the industry conversation, saying the metrics of success for these prizes “are entirely based on business as usual.”

Previous DeSmog investigations found that the industry’s most prestigious climate awards — such as the UK-based Ad Net Zero Awards or the sustainability categories at the global advertising festival Cannes Lions — mostly went to agencies that also worked for fossil fuel companies.

Ad Net Zero said at the time that its award entry forms ask for specific evidence of real-world impact from sustainability campaigns in areas such as food waste or greenhouse gas emissions, and that promoting such work could inspire change in the industry.

The memo’s authors criticised the practice of creating internal “working groups” at agencies to tackle industry-related climate and DEI issues — often made up of the same junior and mid-level staff who had pushed for action from their leadership — as “providing space for talk without power for action.”

In August, a DeSmog investigation revealed that over 800 employees at IPG (now Omnicom) signed a letter demanding then CEO Philippe Krakowsky drop IPG’s polluting clients such as Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company. However, according to meeting notes shared with the hundreds of signatories, senior IPG executives suggested the group that co-ordinated  the open letter should itself convene a working group to explore the issue further. Staff say momentum petered out without executive-backing, and Aramco is still one of the network’s biggest clients.

A dozen IPG staff also said that the firm’s work for Aramco violated its “industry first” climate pledge, made in 2022.

“It felt as though things were happening,” said a former employee at the time, who was involved in a staff-led climate initiative at IPG. “However, it now seems rather superficial. I don’t think the [climate] pledge is worth the digital paper it’s written on to be honest.”