Barclays:
The Dirty Bank

A campaign for Greenpeace taking on Barclays and their dodgy investments

Greenpeace approached us in 2018 asking us to collaborate on a campaign to try and get Barclays bank to drop their investments in toxic tar sands extraction in Canada, which not only risks the global climate but threatens many Indigenous People’s rights and way of life.

We used Barclays’ brand against them - dripping their iconic bird in oil and branding them ‘The Dirty Bank’. The campaign assets were part of a toolkit for volunteers and activists across the country to use outside local branches and for a large-scale action at their Canary Wharf HQ.

The campaign got thousands of Barclays customers to threaten to switch to another bank, and the non-executive in charge of reputation, Mary Francis, said the bank was reviewing its investments in “extreme fossil fuels”. However Greenpeace is still campaigning for concrete action on the issue.

Made at Pentagram with Naresh Ramchandani, Ashley Johnson, Zuleika Sedgley and Chloe Ting