Ashland ESG campaign
Environment, social, and governance (ESG) plays a critical role in Ashland’s long-term business strategy. Sourcing sustainable raw materials, operating cleanly, and developing solutions that help customers create eco-conscious end-consumer products is foundational to their success.
The ESG campaign was designed to showcase the company’s shift to both customers and investors, helping to establish Ashland in a different peer set. No longer is Ashland a commodity player, but a boutique, specialty ingredient company focused on specialized, niche areas where their innovations can have big impact with customers.
The Ashland brand is bold, colorful, and quirky. Most of the brand art is shot in tightly controlled studio sets with bright colors, hard shadows, and physics-defying compositions. The challenge with the ESG campaign was deciding how to translate this very specific brand vibe to something more natural and emotional, and still feel like Ashland.
For our outdoor photo and video shoot, we crafted several unique props to help tell the story. From oversized, moss-covered letters to a “tree stump” built from scratch and designed to represent Ashland’s sourcing (farm), operations (mushroom smoke stacks), and solutions (truck leaving the facility) — all coming together to tell a unique story about Ashland’s commitment to sustainability in every aspect of business operations.
The campaign comprised of 9 videos promoted on web and social, 13 new web pages on Ashland.com dedicated to an enormous amount of ESG content, and an interactive ESG report.
The campaign was a success, increasing traffic to the Ashland channels and creating a lot of buzz. Ashland has continued a drum-beat of communications, weaving this corporate level messaging into business-specific applications.
ESG report
Published in 2022, the fiscal 2021 report highlighted all of the amazing work Ashland has done to move toward a more sustainable company.
