Sustainability
Campaign
ExxonMobil — Exxtend™ Advanced Recycling
Client
ExxonMobil
Sector
Sustainability
Service
Brand and reputation
Format
Campaign
The brief
Advanced recycling had a perception problem.
To most people, recycling means the blue bin, and a process that breaks plastic back to its building blocks sounds like either science fiction or spin. ExxonMobil’s Exxtend technology was real and working, but the story was buried in process. They asked us to take it out of the lab and into everyday life, at a moment when public scepticism about plastic, and about oil majors, was at its peak.
The opportunity
Stop explaining the chemistry. Start telling a human story.
Not how advanced recycling works, but what it means, that plastic written off as waste could have a second life. We reframed a technical process as a hopeful, relatable narrative, and we wrote for two audiences at once: the public forming a view of plastic, and the stakeholders judging ExxonMobil’s credibility on it.
The work
A cinematic campaign where an explainer was expected.
The hero film opens not in a plant but in a kitchen, among the everyday objects plastic becomes, then follows that plastic to its second life. Warm, human and grounded, the opposite of a process diagram. The tone did the persuading. And because a hopeful story invites hard questions, the campaign extended into explainer videos on mass balance attribution: how certified recycled content is actually tracked through production, walked through honestly so the claims stand up to the follow-up question.
The impact
A way to talk about recycling that finally landed.
The campaign gave ExxonMobil a way to talk about advanced recycling that landed with non-technical audiences, and a narrative reused across launch, stakeholder and go-to-market settings, with the attribution videos carrying the proof behind it.
More like this
See all work
