Description
A poster for Lufthansa declaring that the airline is “protecting” the planet has been banned in the UK in a March 2023 ruling. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) investigated the German airline for giving a “misleading” impression of the environmental impact of flying.
The advert - which featured a picture of a plane overlaid on an image of the Earth - boasted the strap line #MakeChangeFly. "Connecting the world. Protecting its future," the poster read.
Aspirations vs significant steps
Lufthansa told the ASA that its environmental claims were based on aspirations, including becoming carbon neutral by 2050 and halving carbon emissions by 2030.
However, the ASA said consumers would view the ad as a claim that Lufthansa had already taken “significant mitigating steps” to ensure that the net environmental impact of its business was not harmful.
No viable green aviation technology
“Many of these initiatives [are] targeted to deliver results only years or decades into the future,” the ASA said. “We also understood that there were currently no environmental initiatives or commercially viable technologies in the aviation industry which would substantiate the absolute green claim ‘protecting its future’, as we considered consumers would interpret it.”
Ads banned
The ASA banned the ad campaign, telling Lufthansa to make clearer and better substantiated environmental claims in the future and to not give a misleading impression of the impact caused by flying with the airline.
“Climate change and the environment is the key and enduring issue of our age,” Miles Lockwood, the director of complaints and investigations at the ASA, said. “Advertisers in high carbon emitting sectors shouldn’t make claims that give consumers a misleading impression about their green credentials and plans or which they can’t substantiate with robust evidence.”
