Decarbonize
The threat to long-term human sustainability (not to mention short-term peace and stability) from climate change is so large and complex, it can be difficult to think about or act on.
Distractive politics have kept it below the threshold, but this won’t last as extreme weather events and mass migrations become too frequent and large to ignore by the citizenry.
But things ARE changing.
At work, my employer WPP has set specific, measurable goals to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2030. These goals apply to the operation of our agencies as well as our value chain.
Perhaps due to my role - media operations and transformation - I can see big opportunities in the goals related to the value chain. New ideas, new workflows, new incentives are all needed.
As it turns out, the media department has some of the biggest re-thinking to do.
Why?
A recent GroupM report estimates that media accounts for more than half of all of our company's total carbon emissions ...
“GroupM and WPP are holding ourselves accountable in our commitment to decarbonization. WPP has committed to reach net-zero across its direct operations (Scopes 1 and 2) by 2025 and its value chain (Scope 3) by 2030. This commitment includes the media GroupM buys on behalf of our clients, which collectively account for more than 50% of WPP’s total emissions. These goals are underpinned by carbon reduction targets that are in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and verified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).”
One concept that media people understand intuitively is "if you can measure it, you can manage it". So it is no surprise that one of my WPP sister agencies (Essence) has already developed a basic media carbon calculator and published initial rankings for the most-commonly used marketing media channels.
How does it work?
“Using the 2019 electricity emission factors for each medium in each market, the Carbon Calculator applies an algorithm to compute both the carbon footprint of a live campaign and the positive impacts different offset options offer. These factors take into account an average of emissions across suppliers in each channel. Variables considered include desktop versus mobile consumption, file sizes, view time, screen type, power consumptions and run cycles. This provides brands the opportunity to measure the relationship of spend and efficiency to environmental impact.”
What are the initial findings?
“As ever, our prioritization of channels will need to hit the right bend of efficiency and effectiveness, with sustainability considerations overlaid according to business need: Online Video and Display generate the most tCO2e per £1 of media spend due mainly, as mentioned above, to the high volume of impacts generated. Cinema, Digital Audio and PPC are grouped closely together, representing another significant dip in levels of tCO2e generated. Newspapers and Radio are the lowest ranking channels, due to high recyclability of the former and low device energy consumption for the latter.”
So, that's that.
But, as the United Nations pointed out recently, we are nowhere near our collective goals yet.
Blockers that are specific to the media industry include (1) standardization, the industry is not working in together, instead individual agencies are trying their own solutions, and (2) urgency, it took 20 years to protect consumer data privacy in digital media, but to achieve the 2030 goals we can’t have that kind of timeline.
And this is how we have started.
Here are links to the reports mentioned above:
https://www.groupm.com/media-decarbonization-framework-groupm/
