Suspect your favorite brands are greenwashing? Here’s how to spot a company that is only giving lip service to their sustainability efforts.


Sustainability isn’t just an environmental imperative, it's good business. Consumer expectations regarding sustainability are rising, and some brands are falling short. As more sustainable products enter the market, consumers are opting to make purchases that align with their values. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars globally; he sustainable packaging market alone was valued at 

NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business

, products marketed as sustainable were responsible for one third of all growth in the consumer packaged goods sector, growing 2.7x faster than their non-sustainable counterparts.

 2021 “Voice of the Consumers Lifestyles” survey outlined how purpose-based organizations are winning with customers by prioritizing transparent communication and accountability. They found that “almost a third of global consumers buy from brands that are aligned with their values and over a fourth boycott those that aren’t.” And those numbers are only expected to grow as online activism continues to influence purchasing behavior.

But every few months we hear a similar story—a brand has been exposed for committing the cardinal sustainability sin: greenwashing.

What exactly is greenwashing? In most cases, it's the over exaggeration or embellishment of sustainability claims in marketing to attract well-meaning shoppers, i.e. when a brand's walk doesn’t match its talk.

As a brand, greenwashing (even well intended mistakes) can lead to bad press and serious implications for the bottom line. As a consumer, it's disheartening and confusing: I believed what I was told, and now I don’t know what’s true… I’m trying to do my part, but how can I trust what a brand is telling me?... What should I look for when I’m trying to buy sustainably?

To answer these questions, here are some greenwashing red flags that you can keep an eye out for:

Vague, open-ended statements chock full of sustainability buzzwords are a greenwashing warning sign. Loaded words like sustainable, natural, or green wind up on packaging and in marketing to create the feeling that a product is eco-friendly, but their broad definitions make the claims nearly impossible to measure and essentially meaningless to the actual cause. Corporate ESG reports and product packaging often talk about sustainability concepts at a high level, opting for sweeping statements with no clear plan of action or metrics to back them up. Basically, if you can’t find any specifics on how the brand or product actually benefits the environment, it’s probably greenwashing.

An IRL example:In 2019, a leading fast food company switched from plastic to paper straws to help “protect the environment.” Turns out that, though the materials were recyclable, the paper straws couldn’t be processed and actually added waste to landfills. The kicker? Their plastic predecessors were actually recyclable…

Not all sustainability claims are created equal. Irrelevant environmental claims can be used to misdirect consumers with statements that are technically true but are either unimportant or based on outdated standards. For example, the Montreal Protocol outlawed the use of ozone-depleting CFCs over 30 years ago, but products are still marketed to this day as “containing no CFCs.” Is it a lie? No. Is it confusing and a little shady? Most definitely.

An IRL example: In 2021, a large household products company claimed that its recycling bags were “designed to handle all types of recyclables.” Alas, not only were the bags themselves not recyclable, but they actually contained chemicals that contaminated any waste that would have otherwise been recyclable. Sure, the bags could physically hold the recyclables, but what good does that do when all the waste put into them ends up in landfills?

If you’ve ever come across sustainability claims that sound too good to be true, they probably are. Companies often opt to share what they’re doing well, without acknowledging the elements of their business that are detrimental to the environment. Greenwashing isn’t illegal, but it is up to the individual organization to choose what sustainability metrics to track and disclose to the public — so keep an eye out and choose brands that share both their positive impacts and areas for improvement. The illusion of perfection is all too easy to achieve these days, but you have to remember it’s still just an illusion.

An IRL example: Major banks have recently shared the steps they’re taking towards investing in sustainable investment opportunities, but a report from the Rainforest Action Network showed that, while banks promote “green” messaging, they have provided nearly $4 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel industry. Remind me, what color are fossil fuels again?

As reports of greenwashing have become more ubiquitous, consumers are increasingly wary of sustainability claims. Some products even go as far as to use words and images to give the impression of a third-party certification when none exists. According to a Business of Sustainability Index report by 

, 53% of Americans never/only sometimes believe sustainability claims and 45% need a third-party source for validation. Look for brands that partner with reputable organizations who specialize in tracking, testing, and substantiating statements.

An IRL example: An alternative milk brand came under fire when they claimed that “climate experts say cutting dairy and meat products from our diets is the single biggest lifestyle change we can make to reduce our environmental impact.” The UK Advertising Standards Authority found that the claim was based on the statement of one climate scientist alone and “overstated what the evidence supported.” Why is everyone always so quick to blame the cows?

So what can you actually do as a consumer?

With so much information and so little time, it can be overwhelming to try and shop our values. If you want to avoid greenwashing, be S.M.A.R.T. Prioritize products and brands whose sustainability claims are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and you’ll be well on your way to avoiding all these pesky red flags.


Be honest — about all of it. Consumers don’t expect perfection, but they don’t want to feel misled. As the science and information surrounding sustainability is constantly changing, it can be difficult to know how to communicate the work that is being done. Develop internal processes and external messaging that prioritize evolution, education, and experimentation. Share the good, don’t hide the not so good, and tell consumers what's being done to strive for improvement.

Greenwashing Gotchas

Strategy Sessions unpack a topic of interest discussed within the JMS strategy team. From business trends to personal passions and everything in between, these conversations spark innovation and help us find new ways of thinking.

Over the past several years, the ever-growing podcast market has changed how we consume information, frame narratives, and receive targeted advertising messages at large. It’s projected that podcasting will be a 

, with over 144 million podcast listeners 

. Beyond that, the opportunity this provides for advertisers and content creators in general to cultivate audiences and disseminate their message with more precision and reach is boundless. Recently, the JMS team discussed the current culture and capabilities of podcasting.

Audiences: Impact Matters Even More Than Reach

Podcasts are such a powerful medium if you know exactly who you're talking to, and you're not trying to talk to everyone. Thinking about really encouraging clients or creators to narrow the audience, hyper-target the audience, and not necessarily feel like they have to make a bunch of different podcasts for any given audience target. Pick the one that's going to be most influenced by the medium. In general, it's still an awareness or an educational play that doesn't have a direct impact on sales, so that's one thing that makes clients a little hesitant. If you are hyper-targeting, that means inevitably, you're kind of lowering the number of people that you're reaching, but you’re reaching the more impactful.

I feel that the weird thing about a podcast strategy is the idea of inventing and creating an audience is often kind of overlooked. I feel like there is a language that's being shaped and being made by the podcasters themselves—and they're actually shaping an audience. That's one of the things that I think we don't do enough. Just generally ‘we,’ the general, royal ‘we.’ We don't do enough study in how audiences are created, and not just existing.

There's this perception that insights—as with audiences—are existing, and you just have to do the uncovering work to find them, but actually what you do, if you're a good strategist or really a good creative thinker, is pick the pieces that feel clickable and put them together. Then you can create the audience the same way you create the insight.

I think there's a huge difference in perception between podcasts and YouTube videos. Podcasts are entertainment, but I think they have this air of, like, intellectual wisdom and being kind of a literary alternative, whereas YouTube is not that.

And there's a lot of credibility that I have for the host. It's almost like the things they recommend are the things they believe in. I wonder if it's deceptive to look at just the level of investment and what you get out of it, because one loyal customer for the rest of their life is maybe more valuable than somebody who buys your thing once randomly and never buys it again.

The Challenge of Predicting Profitability

I think that you need to think about the advertising stack of most of these clients and most clients generally, because usually, when they are promoting a product or running a campaign, they're like, I need to calculate a very specific ROI so that for every dollar I put in, I can get $3.50 out. They're gonna say, “I'm going to go to the very predictable places first.” I think because podcasts are in that niche, unless you really have a very experimental President, CEO, or Head of Marketing, you're never going to get the first bucket of money invested in podcast advertising for that reason. So I think that's the challenge we're always gonna face, just realistically.

When I think about the people who go on a podcast to pitch their idea of their product, it's always those startups that are like, I have no marketing budget anyway, so I don’t care.

As well as, how do you borrow from radio and actually make podcasts kind of part of two things? One, the event strategy of an organization, so that it becomes more presenter-based, maybe, and connected to what's happening on the event calendar. And then two, if we thought about monetizing it as a portable radio show, does that change the way we can kind of go to market with podcasts? It could be kind of an interesting experiment.

Love to listen? Here are some podcast recommendations from our team.

Revisit our collective understanding of historical events and situations

: We’re especially fans of the episodes prior to 2021 with Michael Hobbes as co-host.

: Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast (you can imagine the vibe).

: Nate diMeo’s long-running show is as good as it ever was.

Get into the weeds (in a good way) of unusual or overlooked topics

: What started as a side project has now expanded into a bit of an audio empire, in the form of Radiotopia – a great resource for additional listening recommendations.

 (Seasons 2 and 3): The show that shifted the podcast paradigm has two other seasons – and you know what? They’re really, really well-reported.

 Unwind with shows that are pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh out loud

: Defector’s *genius* concept centers on other people’s (low stakes) drama.

: Improv comedian Laci Mosley strikes just the right balance between admiring and admonishing scammers. (Side note: her guest appearance on Normal Gossip is one of our favorite episodes.)

Content Culture: The State of Podcasting

Three lessons from this year’s Cannes Lions winners.


For some time now, B2B has occupied a sleepy corner of marketing, notorious for a kind of risk-averse pragmatism that favors “what [x product] does” over “why you should care in the first place.” Think: whitepapers, feature lists, and product-pushing banner ads (or what my colleague Gerald Lewis calls, “the toilet paper of the Internet”).


As you might imagine, this doesn’t make for award-winning work — because it is, in many ways, designed to be forgettable. In fact, 

 shows that the majority of B2B creative is “ineffective,” contributing zero in terms of long-term market share growth. But if this year’s Cannes Lions winners tell us anything, it’s that the tide may be, finally, turning.

B2B is a new category for the advertising awards, and one thing stood out among the winners: 

. In other words, it recognizes that there’s a human on the receiving end, and strives to respect their time and attention. Not by talking at them, but by engaging with them — in a way that’s emotional, meaningful, and relevant. If that sounds a lot like B2C marketing, well… that’s because it is.


So, if you’re a B2B marketer stuck making digital toilet paper, here are a few lessons that might inspire you to throw out that dusty old playbook and take a creative risk:

Engagement starts with knowing your audience — not just as a collective, but as individuals. Spotify intuited this, working with creative agency FCB New York to custom-write songs for 14 high-profile CMOs, based on their unique listening preferences. The campaign, “A Song for Every CMO,” drove $1B in ad revenue, proving that a high-touch, personal activation can far exceed spray-and-pray tactics when done right.

The Grand Prix winner of the B2B category, Sherwin-Williams worked alongside Wonderman-Thompson to deploy conversational AI, which helped architects, designers and DIYers find their perfect palette. Not only was “

” simple and smart, but it reinvented the legacy brand for a digital world, and reinforced its value through a highly engaging — and highly useful — experience.

Lesson 2: Let your product speak for itself.

Sometimes the best “ads” aren’t the creative messages you make about your product, but rather the statement that comes from your product. Dole Sunshine Company’s partnership with Ananas Anam turned agricultural waste from pineapple harvesting into a vegan leather alternative that’s been used by 1000 global brands — generating over $100M in revenue for the agri-giant.

Strahl’s “Handle with I Don’t Care” campaign sent their durable drinkware in the mail — sans packaging — to bars across Norway. Not only did each one arrive intact, but every single recipient placed an order for their business. Know your product, show how it solves a real problem, rinse and repeat.

By now, “purpose-driven” is a buzzword that can describe any company with an ESG initiative (see: every company). But this year’s B2B winners showed that true purpose is about walking the walk — not just talking the talk. Be it buying back 250,000 kegs from bars to power a local community, or harnessing the influence of hip-hop hype culture to promote black-owned businesses, or developing a coat that produces as much oxygen as an oak tree, Heineken, Mercado Livre, and Azgard 9 show that taking real action can make a world of difference for people, businesses and your bottom line.

To summarize: in B2B, the head doesn’t have to compete with the heart.

Just because you’re building a B2B brand doesn’t mean you have to park your “personhood.” When we market to business people as people (and not just “decision makers”), the work gets better — and works harder.

Let’s all stop pretending that B2B should play by a different set of rules.

At some point in our history at JMS, someone wrote a headline for one of our clients. (Not a particularly spectacular opening line, I know, but bear with me for a paragraph, or two.) The brief was to recast a 30-year-old global technology brand as a vital, young software company, capable of competing with the likes of their smaller, younger Silicon Valley competition. The ad ran as a series of billboards on the 101, declaring to the start-up disruptors that our client was in the neighborhood, and there to compete.

The headline? “We start up every day.”

Just a line, of course. A solid interpretation of what we (as a creative company) are asked to do all the time. Meet the brief. Be smart. Be creative. Be memorable.

But as my own company’s age is now, also, in double-digit territory, I’m reminded of that line, and the intended truth of it—that to be great at what you do, to be vital, relevant, and valuable to the world, you have to do just that. Start up everyday.

That’s what I love about JMS. We are founded on helping our clients embrace, and make the most of constant change. We don’t rest on our laurels, or repeat the same old models defined by the creative agencies of the last century. That’s why, when we started 13 years ago, we didn’t want to be known as just an “agency,” hence the “S” in JMS.

As a studio, we’ve operated differently from day one. We treat our clients like partners. We make it a point to understand their business, and recognize that we are in business to leverage our creative talents in the service of what they need.

These past 13 years have been proof of that approach, every day. We’ve repositioned, redesigned, and relaunched global brands. We’ve weathered pandemics, won awards, cooked countless Thursday suppers, helped launch start-ups and transform blue chips. We’ve executed countless commercials, billboards, banner ads and social posts, sure, but we’ve also developed mobile games, AR/VR product tours and webinars, original content series, social newsrooms, executive thought leadership programs, influencer activations, and corporate culture initiatives.

We coded a cause-related social network within a retail website to activate and engage customers. We developed a web app that enabled kids to promote themselves, and receive funding for college from individual donors anywhere in the world. We created a rap battle to advertise networking equipment. We wrote and directed a musical parody that posed the question “was Thomas Alva Edison a d*ck?” We convinced the city of New York that a giant plexiglass cube full of old routers, switches, and cables was a public art piece. Of course all of this mayhem was driven by one primary objective: to provide value to our clients with surprising, engaging, smart, culturally relevant creative thinking in the service of their brand.

That was the thing. We recognized early on that if our clients and partners needed us, regardless of the assignment, it was the most valuable thing we could do. As the saying goes “Everything is a chance to build a brand.”

Come to think of it, a slight addendum. Not actually “regardless of the assignment”.

There was a moment when Juul came to us in the early days of their existence. They were still owned by PAX, and not the marketing plutonium of a brand they are today. This was the early days of the California legalization heyday, and we were excited to talk to anyone associated with PAX. But after one or two meetings with the incredibly nice, stylish 20-30 somethings who were talking to us about the potential opportunity we had with Juul, we politely declined. I looked around at the faces of my people in the meeting as they were enthusiastically absorbing the opportunity, and then as the enthusiasm drained from their faces once they realized the product they’d be marketing. I knew in an instant, this was not a brand we could believe in, or work for.
It was my proudest moment at JMS.

So, after 13 years of passion, inspiration, ingenuity, effort, and accomplishment what’s next?

Honestly, more change. If that last two years has taught us anything, it’s that surprise is always just around the corner. Whether good or bad, change happens and those who fear or rail against it are doomed to be part of the past, not leading the future. So stay tuned as we consider the evolving world of hybrid work, content at scale, inclusivity and accessibility, brand transformation and Tik Tok swallowing the media world whole. There’s no doubt that the result will be surprising ideas, compelling work, new relationships, and no end to exciting possibilities.

Here’s to wherever we’ll go! Thank you, JMS.

JMS at 13

Every three months, we invite a new artist to interpret the possibilities of a singular 250 square foot wall in our studio, according to their creative practice.

This site is an archive of the continuing transformations of the space, and an introduction to the people who catalyze this process.

The project was realized in 2015 when our first featured artist, Jessica Eastburn, shared a piece for Limited Edition’s inaugural show. An exploration in what the artist calls “comics and cacophony,” the work is dynamic and full of movement and emotion. Since then, JMS has featured photography, sculpture, neon artwork, textiles, collage, and much more. 

Each quarter celebrates a different point of view, and enlivens the JMS space with the constant reminder that art can shape our days and offer endless inspiration when we choose to make a steady space for it in our lives, and our work.

Meet Limited Edition

While perhaps we can all agree that a community is a group of supportive people assembled in a specific space, the logistics, geography, and manifestations of said groups have drastically changed in the technology age. 

It’s no longer about mere physical proximity— who we live near, who we see in the office, who our kids carpool with to school. Our communities have multiplied, and exponentially so. 

Communities by the thousands live in our phones, are tethered to apps, and center around particular interests, ideas, and obsessions. So what does that mean for a society of consumers? How does it change the way we relate to the things we buy, and perhaps even why we buy them?

It’s a trend that’s been growing since pre-pandemic days, and exploded once the world went into lockdown: people are looking for meaning. The absence of intentionality in our lives, our decisions, and our purchases is simply no longer sufficient. This is where community comes in, that thing which reminds us why we keep trying, why we endeavor to improve. Be it through activism, art, sustainability, or business.

In short, a brand can be a kind of community. 

And a synergistic one at that—something that can come to express much more than the mere products it sells, a kind of critical value larger yet more intangible than a bottom line. 

For Issue 2 of JMS Editorial, our team spent some time with this concept of community. In these articles, we delve into the changing landscape of communication, question our daily routines, and celebrate the ways in which community can be the lifeblood of creativity—even in times of unprecedented loss.

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

It’s an unavoidable truth: we live in an age of continuous content. 

This catch-all term has come to name everything we consume, from TV shows to memes, gifs to tweets, long form editorial to TED Talks, and everything else in between. Content is propaganda, truth, lies, prophecy, escape. All that we produce, automatically falls into this great big pool of content. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. But hasn’t this always been the case with art? With story? With the various products of a society? The metric we use is perhaps not so simple—here I give you good content, there they give you bad. Perhaps it’s more about what resonates, what remains. It’s about what’s necessary, what has the power to redirect a conversation, or start an entirely new one. To make a person feel something deeply, to give them pause—is this what “good” content should do?

Content is propaganda, truth, lies, prophecy, escape.

For our first issue of JMS Editorial, our team focused on different aspects of the content economy, and questioned the ways it shapes our days and shapes our decisions. Because ultimately, content is something we can either be passive about, sifting through it indifferently and creating iterations of the same thing, or we can be active in this space, pushing boundaries and finding new ways of thinking that, in turn, inspire a chain reaction of more transgressive ways of thinking, too.

The Case Against Content

JMS Founder and Chief Creative Officer, John McNeil, shares his journey into the world of marketing and advertising, from his first job in the art studio at Hill Holiday to future leadership roles at Ogilvy, McCann, and now his own studio. With podcast host Paul McEnany, John considers the role of advertising in culture, the process of whittling an idea down to its simplest form, and how his own leadership style has evolved over the course of his time in the industry.

John McNeil on Creativity, Leadership, and the Power of Advertising

To further John McNeil Studio’s mission of delivering dynamic, innovative solutions to our clients, the studio has expanded its strategy offering. Our unique model encompasses the values of our studio—consistently putting creativity and brand at the center of all that we do.

“The type of strategic thinking of the past was pretty limited to marketing,” explains Founder and CEO John McNeil. “What we’re saying is that the type of strategy that comes from this mode of thinking can be infused across every aspect of the business.”

JMS combines three strategic disciplines—brand transformation, content and social strategy and innovations—to meet the needs of today’s digitally-driven business. “The days of ‘stay in your lane’ are over,’” says Sonia Minden, JMS Strategy Director. “Every strategist should think creatively, and every great creative is also a problem-solver. We try to strip away the traditional silos that get in the way of good work.”

Thinking creatively also requires the ability to be agile. “What makes us unique specifically in the innovations realm is the ability to think really quickly on our feet and adapt to the changing environments our clients live in,” says Remi Abbas, Executive Director of Strategy and Insight. “That allows us to move from the questioning and deep inquiry phase, to the solution that is needed to bring that to life.”

From those solutions, meaningful experiences are created for clients and their customers. The studio’s holistic approach works to consider this notion of experience from every angle, so clients can better understand their power and positioning, and avoid becoming stagnant. “In a world where experience is critical and the most valuable thing to any business,” McNeil adds, “bringing to life the customer and the customer experiences – their wants and needs and interests and loves – is very materially tied to how modern brands need to show up. And knowing that the work we do has had such an impact on our clients, we want to do more of it.”

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

 is an experimental community space in the heart of San Francisco. Ahead of the 2020 election, the PROXY team wanted to bring their community together around a common message of unity. JMS saw a bigger opportunity. What if we turned the traditional billboard on its head and created something that had never been done before?

Enter, Stamp Out. An interactive billboard where the community could come together and actively stamp out corruption. Our design solution created a powerful opportunity—one stamp, representing one voice, would show the power of democracy.And the message was threefold—people applying stamps to the billboard funded the USPS, supported mail-in voting, and spoke out against corruption.

The results? 30 Days, 10,000+ stamps, and the largest mail-in voting turnout in history.

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

CVS Health’s “Healthy Conversations,” Finalist for Creative Floor Healthcare Awards

When CVS Health tapped JMS to innovate new ways of sharing critical health information and stories from the COVID-19 pandemic, both teams were energized by the prospect of reaching an audience of healthcare providers in a time of crisis.

The resulting project, “Healthy Conversations,” is a first-of-its-kind, video-led content series aimed to promote an open dialogue centered on health insights and developments throughout the pandemic. The video component of the project allows for data to be highlighted in dynamic, digestible formats, while the podcast gives way to in-depth conversations among leading health experts. Additionally, a variety of social media content supports each narrative.

“Our goal was to reach a particularly time-crunched audience: healthcare providers,” explains Strategy Director, Sarah Jessee. “With so much COVID coverage out there, we found a disconnect between healthcare coverage that delivers the hard-hitting data providers want, and the human elements that make for a great story. We saw an opportunity for CVS Health to marry the two by utilizing proprietary data points from CVS's wealth of in-depth healthcare research.”

“Healthy Conversations” was launched in August 2020, and after just five months achieved an 18% engagement rate as well as a 92.8% video view rate and 19.5M+ total impressions.

Transformation takes a lot more than an ad campaign.

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making  a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.

Greenwashing Gotchas

Content Culture: The State of Podcasting

Let’s all stop pretending that B2B should play by a different set of rules.

JMS at 13

Meet Limited Edition

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

The Case Against Content

John McNeil on Creativity, Leadership, and the Power of Advertising

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

Healthy Conversations

Transformation takes a lot more than an ad campaign.

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.

Greenwashing Gotchas

Content Culture: The State of Podcasting

Let’s all stop pretending that B2B should play by a different set of rules.

JMS at 13

Meet Limited Edition

From Scapegoat to Saving Grace

The Case Against Content

John McNeil on Creativity, Leadership, and the Power of Advertising

John McNeil Studio Expands Strategy Offering

The Fight to Save Democracy (and the USPS)

Healthy Conversations

That’s why we’re always thinking about and making  a million things at once. Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to.