Over the past 10 years, marketers, agencies, publishers and edtech vendors have had to deal with consumer privacy, misinformation, visibility, fraud and complex collective challenges around diversity and inclusion. Over the next 10 years, the $600 billion advertising industry will have to play its part in fighting climate change. A February 2023 IAB Europe report showed that consistency is already one of the top digital advertising challenges for marketers after cookieless targeting and measurement. A recent World Federation of Advertisers survey highlighted that in five years’ time, stability will become the most important part of the CMO role.
Brands, agencies, media and tech companies are working to reduce the carbon footprint of the marketing and advertising industry. Doing so is not only a new industry challenge – it’s a way to make a difference. While defining standard data measurement and KPIs for digital and media decarbonization is a work in progress, companies that meet and anticipate the challenge now will gain a competitive advantage.
However, when you examine your carbon footprint, make sure you consider more than just your own advertising and marketing investments because:
- The direct impact of your marketing investment is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, the carbon footprint of advertisements is a negligible part of the equation. Advertising and content production, online and offline marketing and distribution of advertising assets, data consumption and device usage represent a direct impact of your marketing investment. For many industries such as automotive, CPG, or telecom, the direct impact of marketing is negligible.
- The indirect effect of marketing contribution to sales is the elephant in the room. Product, packaging and distribution play a much larger role than marketing investment for most industries.
- The long-term impact is the most important but the most difficult to measure. Beyond the direct and indirect effects of marketing investment, advertising and marketing play a huge role in shaping mass culture and imagination. It is the CMO’s responsibility to avoid reinforcing existing stereotypes about consumerism and to invent positive ways to highlight sustainable lifestyles.
While it’s still early days, marketing must move towards measurement
Forrester could only find various estimates analyzing the carbon footprint of digital advertising, but there are no recent, independent and reliable estimates of the total carbon impact of offline and online marketing investments. CMOs should know, however, that various industry initiatives are making good progress. It is also realistic to expect an agreement on the Sustainability Data Framework and Standards in the next 12 to 18 months because:
- Offline advertising and marketing has a negative impact on the environment, but online marketing also hurts the planet. While advertisements are only a subset of total Internet activity, carbon emissions are largely due to the electricity used by the millions of servers that fill ad space, load creatives, and publish content in real time, as well as power electronic devices. Used to use. Consume it.
- CMOs cannot compare the carbon impact of different campaign strategies. If you’re launching a global multimedia campaign with multiple creative and media agencies, measuring carbon emissions throughout its lifecycle is a nightmare. At the country level, each firm has its own calculator, and there is little agreement on the exact scope of data, framework and methodology to use.
- The industry is starting to speak the same digital sustainability language. This is especially true with initiatives like Ad Net Zero.
- The marketing community must coordinate swiftly to anticipate tighter regulation. France is leading the pack here, with stakeholders coordinating to launch an open source repository to harmonize a joint approach.
Take Six Steps to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Your Marketing Function
The marketing community is waking up to the environmental crisis, but it needs to ramp up its efforts. CMOs can’t wait to tackle this challenge. “We’re in an era of ‘show me, don’t tell me,’ so the more you act, even in a small way, the better. Consumers want to know what you’re doing right now, five Not in years. It’s a significant change,” says Valerie Hernando-Presse, CMO at Danone.
To counter the broader environmental impact of marketing, Forrester recommends implementing a holistic environmental sustainability blueprint. The blueprint includes strategies for avoiding greenwashing and outlines how teams should master six key levers: purpose, value proposition, ecodesign, co-creation, cognitive and behavioral science, and story-making. When it comes to reducing the carbon footprint of marketing work, you can act now and:
- Extend your existing measurement approach and optimize beyond ROI.
- Demonstrate the marketing ROI of your sustainability efforts.
- Use marketing mix modeling to analyze how consistency affects results.
- Prioritize reducing the carbon footprint of your creative and production assets.
- Add sustainability criteria to your RFP process and challenge your partners.
- Educate and upgrade your marketing, media, data and communications teams.
This post was written by VP, Principal Analyst Thomas Hewson and originally appeared Here,
