Measuring the Carbon impact of advertising
The Purpose Disruptors are a collective of professionals working in the advertising industry who formed with the goal of making their sector tackle climate change. Their mission is to change advertising from within by encouraging designers, marketers, publicists and other creatives to repurpose their industry to align with meeting climate change targets. To do so, the network has run a range of events, like pub nights, climate summits, actions studios and other industry initiatives.
The Great Reset - a blueprint to rethink advertising
The Covid-19 pandemic led the group to publish the Great Reset - an initiative that builds on the positive lessons learned at the heart of the current public health crisis with the aim of applying them to the challenge of climate change. The Great Reset is built on interventions at the personal, industry and society-level that professionals can take, such as pledges and actions to use their creative skills, to reshape their sector to help in meeting the 1.5°C global warming target in the Paris Climate agreement.
From profitability to eco-effectiveness - a new metric for advertisers?
Two members of the Purpose Disruptors recently came up with a simple metric to measure the climate impact of their work. They shared their initiative with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), which represents more than 4000 professionals in the field. They applied a simple calculation, which is a measure of the emissions associated with the increase in sales attributed to advertising campaigns, expressed as: ‘the uplift in sales driven by advertising’ X ‘the carbon footprint per item sold’ = ‘the uplift in greenhouse gas emissions driven by advertising’.
Another measure they propose is to replace or supplement the standard business measure of ‘Return on Investment’, by a ‘Return on Carbon’ (ROCO²) which indicates the revenue per each amount of carbon emitted in the project: ‘Incremental revenue from advertising’/ ’uplift in greenhouse gas emissions driven by advertising’ = ‘revenue per ton of CO2’. The aim there being to maximise profitability while minimising carbon emissions. This is an adaptation of the kind of measures common in investment circles relating to industry sectors. Others include ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI), ‘energy return on capital invested’ (EROCI), and ‘energy return on carbon’ (EROC).
Making advertising more responsible
Besides stressing the importance of reporting on the climate impact of their work, the Purpose Disruptors propose different approaches to create positive impact from the way advertising works. They focus on three main levers for change:
1. Switching the product - by promoting electric vehicles over SUVs or encouraging re-used products.
2. Create carbon-free value - by encouraging service-based value creation
3. Encourage positive human behaviour - such as promoting the use of public transport over car ownership.
What we think - is changing advertising enough?
At Badvertising we believe that high carbon advertising has no place in a world that is facing the devastating impacts of climate breakdown. This is why we campaign for the removal of adverts for products and services that strongly fuel the climate change emergency, such as SUVs, flights and fossil fuel products. With advertising serving the interests of big polluters, and driving us away from meeting safe climate targets, we believe that creatives could better use their skills in serving people and the planet, rather than promoting hyper-consumerist lifestyles. The Purpose Disruptors’ initiative to move their sector towards responsible practices and to be transparent about the climate impacts of their work is a positive step. But there is a fine line that is easy to cross between pushing genuine change, and creating only the impression of progress working for companies with a bad track record of carbon emissions, like the automotive, the airline and fossil fuel industries. There is much more work to be done to assess the full carbon hit from advertising.