Well-calculated wrong decisions
Opinion
This London Climate Action Week, there’s promising news of progress in calculating media emissions. Just make sure we don’t mistake signposts for destinations, says Thinkbox’s Simon Tunstill.
Humans find it hard to look past their short-term interests – otherwise we’d all eat healthily, drink moderately, floss manically, and invest way more in brand building.
The climate crisis is a profound example. It has slipped down the agenda recently because of shorter-term concerns and political winds.
Ignoring it won’t make the crisis go away, however. I have tried, but no glaciers have reformed, no coral has regrown.
And, while it may have taken a temporary back seat, it’s only a matter of time before it climbs back up the agenda. When it does, media emissions will receive more scrutiny, and we must be prepared for that.
Thankfully, good people are busy doing good things
Ad Net Zero just announced the latest Global Media Sustainability Framework (GMSF), an initiative to create a standard, industry-agreed way to measure media emissions.
The GMSF is important. Without standardisation, comparisons of media carbon are problematic.
The GMSF will underpin the IPA’s new media carbon calculator. There are already plenty of media carbon calculators, but outputs vary significantly. Fuelled by the GMSF, the IPA’s calculator can be a trusted source of insight on media carbon emissions.
This is good news. But calculators also pose a risk.
Signposts, not destinations
The danger with any metric is that once we can measure something precisely, we start treating it as what matters. Dashboard dopamine is addictive stuff.
Media carbon is no exception. We’ve already seen attempts at playing media top trumps based on carbon per impression.
Choosing the lowest emissions per impression may seem sustainable, but if it takes a vast number of those impressions to achieve the required results, is it really sustainable?
Carbon efficiency needs to be balanced with media effectiveness. WPP Media’s “return on carbon” is a good model. It fuses Profit Ability 2 with its own carbon data to create plans that achieve business goals with the lowest possible emissions.
But even when effectiveness is factored in, that still isn’t the whole story. There are other important aspects of advertising to consider…
Advertising’s “double materiality”
Every form of advertising has emissions attached to it – except maybe word of mouth, depending on what you’ve eaten.
Sustainability experts talk about “double materiality” – the idea that an activity can create environmental impacts while also helping reduce them. Advertising is a good example.
So the decarbonisation effects of an ad campaign promoting sustainable behaviour could outweigh or mitigate its carbon footprint – look at Channel 4’s work with BCorps, the Sky Zero Footprint Fund, or EDF’s campaign encouraging drivers to charge electric vehicles overnight using zero-carbon electricity.
Advertising also funds content that helps drive sustainable change, like the heat pumps featured in ITV’s Emmerdale, which doubled consumer understanding.
And some advertising has catalytic effects that carbon-per-impression misses. TV improves the performance of social and search by 14%, for example. A medium that boosts the effectiveness of other channels may reduce the total emissions needed to achieve a business objective.
Then there’s “wastage”. Misleading word, but let’s run with it. Not all wastage is equal – some is even desirable. TV’s broad reach and lasting effects build future value and behaviour change.
These dual, network, and longer-term effects are all absent from carbon-per-impression data.
We’re heading towards having a standardised way to measure media emissions and make better-informed decisions about advertising. That’s great news, and huge congratulations go to the many from across the industry who are collaborating to make it happen.
But we must not lose sight of the broader picture of how advertising works and what it does.
Use GMSF-aligned methodologies. Consider emissions alongside effectiveness. And remember that advertising influences positive behaviour, and some advertising also funds influential climate content.
Calculating carbon is a fundamental first step in decarbonising media plans, but that is all it is. There are many others to take afterwards.
If we make choices based solely on what the machine says, we’ll end up with well-calculated wrong decisions.
Simon Tunstill is Thinkbox’s Communications Director and Sustainability Lead.