EPISODE 6 - ADVERTISING SUSTAINABILITY - TRANSCRIPT
Host Sonoo Singh - Founder, The Creative Salon
Matt Bourn – Director of Communications, The Advertising Association
Ben Essen – Chief Strategy Officer, Iris
Harriet Kingaby – Co-Chair The Conscious Advertising Network
Sonoo: Hello and welcome to the Conscious Thinking Podcast from The Conscious Advertising Network, this is the next in the series of though provoking sessions where today we’re discussing Advertising Sustainability. I’m your host Sonoo Singh from The Creative Salon and with me I have Ben Essen, the Chief Strategy Officer at Iris, Matt Bourn the Director of Communications at The Advertising Association and The Conscious Advertising Network co-Founder Harriet Kingaby. Welcome everyone and thank you for being here.
So Harriet let’s start with you, I would like you to answer the first question, why does our industry need to drive the conversation on sustainability?
Harriet: Well as an industry we have huge influence around what people think and the behaviours that are perceived to be normal or desirable. And our whole industry is about persuasion, persuasion to do something, persuasion to buy something, so it’s really really important that we as an industry get behind this, because it is the greatest challenge of our time. We’ve got COP26 coming up this year, it’s going to be a huge year for climate action and if the advertising industry can get behind this, then I think we can go a long way to changing hearts and minds, changing behaviours and creating a great narrative for the UK this year.
Sonoo: Obviously the trade body itself, The Advertising Association, and I’ll come to you in a bit Matt, has launched the first ever very significant the initiative which is called the adnetzero plan to help improve the advertising industry’s environment credentials through this pandemic, but Ben now with the economic crisis, it’s all very well to talk about sustainability and climate crisis, how far up do you think climate is on the agenda of the clients that you talk to?
Ben: It’s an interesting one, I actually tried to start a sustainability practice within Iris, back just after the financial crash in 2008 and very quickly realised that no clients wanted to hear me talk about sustainability back then, and I’ve been trying to work out if it’s going to be the same this time around. I think there are some key differences this time and I think it is high up the agenda, the big difference being that the last time that we hit a recession and the climate fell off the agenda, everything was about consumer led conversations, so it was ‘hey well let’s get consumers to turn to 30 when they are doing their washing’ etc, and as a result, as soon as consumers started going ‘actually I can’t worry about the climate right now, I need to worry about my next pay cheque and whether I can afford washing powder and being a savvy shopper’ and all those things that dominated the last decade, rather than climate, it meant that there was no role to talk to clients about it. This time around it isn’t consumer led, it’s organisational led, and I think the greatest weapon we have is science based targets and the fact that more and more organisations are committing to halve their impact by 2030, get to net zero by .. our own clients Vodafone just brought their net zero target back ten years to 2040, they are putting these targets in saying ‘we’re going to do this’ and I think you can use that as ammunition to go in and have difficult conversations. This isn’t about ‘hey we think your customers might fancy this’, it’s about ‘you said you were going to do it so you’d better commit to it, and better deliver on it’.
Sonoo: Could you tell us about this advertising zero plan initiative and also could you tell us in detail as to who has joined up and what the long terms plans are?
Matt: I think it’s really interesting, we’re at an interesting point in time, if I think about the origins about where our climate work stream’s come from, around about 15 / 18 months ago we had a strategy planning session with the AA Council, and you’ve got about forty of the industry’s leaders there from agencies, trade associations, media owners, tech companies, advertisers … and we asked them to essentially help us to step the next three years of work, so starting in 2020. And the message that came through from the Council was all about responsibility which led to the creation of a new mission for the Advertising Association, where we’ve moved from, if you like, making the economic argument for advertising, to actually looking at the responsibility that advertising has towards people and society, as well as businesses and the economy. And one of the fast emerging work streams that came out of that new mission was climate action. So we’ve spent the last 12 months essentially looking at that issue and saying what is it that we as an industry we need to do about this issue? Because our own research has shown us that advertising professionals want us to do something about it. So if you look at the stats, something like 70% of people working in our industry are worried about the negative impacts of our industry on the environment, and 91% are saying that if they know that the organisation they are working for is doing something about the climate then that will improve their job satisfaction. So we have kind of got evidence if you like from the professionals themselves and we’ve got the steering from the leaders of our industry who are saying ‘get a hold of this issue and really sort of help shape the direction of travel where we can take positive action on climate. And that’s not easy (laughs), that’s not easy at all, we’ve spent really the 12 months of 2020 trying to understand what it is that we can do, what are the tangible things that we can do, and what that’s led to is the launch of adnetzero.
Sonoo: So Matt on that point, actually I do have another question as I’m kind of curious about these digital and data-driven marketing industries, because both these industries do face serious questions over their environmental record. But as I understand, neither the Data Marketing Association nor the IAB UK joined the coalition initially, has that changed? Also what is the long term plan to accelerate the uptake and impact of this programme?
Matt: So that’s, I think, a bit of error reporting, because the IAB and BMA are part of the Council so they signed off on the strategy, so they are very much on board with the climate action workstream from the Ad Association’s perspective and certainly very very supportive of adnetzero. We’ve got cross industry consensus on this, in terms of what it is that we need to do. I think when we started looking at this it’s really daunting, it’s a massive massive issue that touches on every aspect of everybody’s lives. And advertising as an industry kind of sits right at the heart of all of this. So the initial reaction is ‘gosh it’s really overwhelming, what have we got to do’, and then what we’re lucky enough as the AA is to have formed two groups, we had an action group and a steering group and we’ve had brilliant chairs of those, Ben’s been a member of the working group, and we’ve tried to understand ‘ok what is it that we can do’. And so with adnetzero, it was brilliant Dominic Mills has described it as ‘half manifesto, half action plan’. And I think he’s nailed it with that. The ambition of is to be real net zero by 2030, the action plan is a five step plan saying ‘this is how we’re going to get to that’.
Sonoo: Now a question both for you Harriet and Ben, because Matt talked about this cross industry initiative … now you obviously know that the UK competition watchdog, the UK competition marketing authority, they recently announced that they are looking into our products and services that claim to be eco-friendly are marketed and whether consumers are being misled by such claims … do you think that our industry needs to join up on those initiatives that are already there, rather than launching their own programmes, or do you think that would just dilute the ambitious climate policies? Harriet you go first.
Harriet: Yes, I think we do need a consistent sense of what is ‘greenwash’ or what is unacceptable when we communicate these messages. So we at The Conscious Advertising Network, for example, have just done a big piece of work around climate misinformation and within that we’ve included things like what we call the Big Tobacco Playbook, which is all around greenwashing and companies saying that they are a lot more eco-friendly than they actually are, and as I’ve said we’ve got COP26 coming up in November next year and traditionally we’ve been told that the advertising surrounding these conferences is all from high carbon industries who are trying to say ‘we’re doing loads better than we actually are, look at us, look at our green renewable energy’, when actually that’s only a tiny proportion of their business plan. So as an industry, I think we do need that, and we do need to be having tough conversations around it, it doesn’t matter if this is a big incumbent client, can we really answer this brief in the way we’ve been asked to? And also thinking about that misinformation that’s out there, it doesn’t just come from high carbon organisations, it also comes from state actors on the internet or it comes from trolls or the far right we know that as well. So I think we do need an understanding of what kind of messaging is ok, and what kind of media placement is ok and what isn’t, and I think we need to co-ordinate that. And I also think as an industry we need a strategy for how we make sure that we are countering messages out there that are going to try to derail this process, and that’s what the report, that we’re going to put out early next year, is going to focus on.
Sonoo: So just expanding on that Ben, as an advertising agency and as you said that has launched a sustainable division within Iris, how difficult it is for the entire industry to be part of the solution to the climate crisis. For instance, do you think we will ever get to a point where the industry would simply not work with oil companies or companies that are on the wrong side of the climate crisis?
Ben: Yes I think we need to be very clear, first of all on what is within our power to change it, and then make that change happen as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and I think you know particularly the Advertising Association work is really focussed in that space. It’s like ok, what do we have control of and if we work collectively as an industry how can we change it? You know we have actually a lot of power. I think equally we need to be aware of what is beyond the scope of our personal autonomy as organisations and a collective, yet something that we can still influence. And I think both of those are equally important but we have to approach them in different ways. I think second area is much more about creating a movement and bringing in partners and stakeholders from outside us.
For example, I’m really interested in Maersk, not the sort of poster child of sustainability, but a massive shipping company who have been saying ‘we want to create emissions free shipping by 2030’. This goes way beyond the power of us as an organisation or any single stakeholder group, and can only be achieved through collective action. But ‘hey we’re going to go on this mission who else will join us?’ There are going to be non-profits or other competitors will get involved and I think there’s a sense of ‘that is the only way to approach this thing’. It’s not a matter of waiting for someone else to do it, it’s also not saying ‘hey look we can solve this ourselves’ but by kind of pointing, putting that goal out there and then working with other organisations, internally and externally, we can get there.
Now if you take your example of ‘do we work with an oil company or not?’ I think for me, I’d be saying we want to be halving the emissions from gas and oil by 2030, that’s our objective, so we’ll only work with oil companies who are going to do that, or we’re going to help them do that, it doesn’t need to be binary but I think it is important to say this is the goal that we’re working towards and anything that isn’t aligned with that we shouldn’t be aligning with.
Sonoo: Yeah that’s interesting. Matt how are you going to make it for agencies and for the industry at large with adnetzero, for instance the deal with high carbon clients, would you say and suggest we ban a certain style of advertising or would you even come to a point for instance where you might have a traffic light system to show the industry as to which brands are doing better when it comes to sustainability and climate crisis?
Matt: I don’t know about the traffic light system, I mean the first thing I would say is that it’s important to recognise the role of the Advertising Standards Authority, and the ASA already have very clear regulations about things like greenwashing, and has pulled up companies like Shell for recent advertising campaigns. And I do know that the ASA are currently reviewing their regulations around climate related advertising and looking at where they may be further strengthened. So I think first of all we should have the confidence in our self-regulatory body to do the job that we need to do. The second point I would make is I wouldn’t underestimate the amount of pressure that there is on industries to change, and that is across the board. Everywhere I look from a Government conversation, there is tremendous pressure on these businesses to change. If they don’t change fast enough they will not exist. They will not be legally viable in terms of the way in which they operate, there is tremendous pressure there. And the brilliant thing about advertising is that advertising is all about competitive advantage and I can’t see any industry where there won’t be competitive advantage in moving to a more positive impact on climate as fast as you can and in fact faster than your competitors. So that’s the role of advertising, what we’ve got to do is convince our clients that they need to get there quicker. They need to get there quicker and advertising is a lever to pull to change that behaviour, and the faster we do that the more impact we will have.
Sonoo: Now Harriet the Conscious Advertising Network and Media Bounty have done a bit of work around climate denial and I understand that there’s a report that’s coming out, could you tell us a bit about that ?
Harriet: Yeah absolutely. So it’s a report with The Conscious Advertising Network, Media Bounty, Check and Pulsar, and we have looked at the Covid misinformation obviously over the last year and looked at what we can learn in terms of what we think will happen this year with climate denial and climate misinformation. And there are some really key things to pull out there. I think the first thing is that the discourse around climate denial has changed hugely, we don’t see so much climate change is a hoax, what we are seeing more of is what we call delay messaging, so that’s not necessarily challenging that climate change is happening but perhaps suggesting an alternative. So ‘oh it’s not really manmade it’s all sunspots’ for example or it might be saying ‘we shouldn’t have to act until China acts’, it might be saying actually ‘climate change alarmists are hurting our children’ and so that discourse of messaging has changed and I think it’s important to be aware of that, because what we don’t want to do is to call for action for the hoax messaging to be de-monetised, or whatever that is, when there’s another whole discourse out there.
I think the second big thing to pull out of that report for advertisers is that we’re really concerned that the denial messaging is being tested on, and using paid advertising essentially, on social media platforms and elsewhere, to really test and learn around what works and what really activates people. And we have seen evidence of what we call four dirty strategies online in relation to climate denial – the first of which I talked about the big tobacco playbook, you will see that when our scientists appear on the front page of the newspaper for some scandal that’s unrelated to the science that they are talking about, we saw it with Professor Bob Ward years ago at the University of East Anglia leaks, we saw it with Professor Neil Ferguson during the pandemic when there was a dead cat strategy around his personal life, so that’s the first one. The second one is a culture wars strategy which we see a lot from politicians where we pick one group against each other, and we say it’s the elites versus the rest of us ordinary people, we’ve seen that a lot in political discourse recently; we’ve also got kind of trolling strategies which come either from coordinated bots and trolls with an agenda or from individual people. And then our fourth one is momentarily escaping me which is terrible because I’ve just spent six months on this (laughs).
So we’ve got these different strategies that we see online and it’s really important to be aware of them, because our responses to them, how we need to be aware of them, need to vary. Responses might be that we beef up our misinformation strategies when it comes to media placement, making sure that on the open web we’re not appearing on certain areas of the internet where there’s misinformation or hate speech being spread. That might mean asking some questions about where we can target pro climate media kind of messages and diverse media carriers receive funding from our advertising. So there’s an awful lot that the advertisers can do when it comes to climate denial as well.
Sonoo: Listeners we do have another podcast dedicated to climate denial alone, so you can listen there for more – Harriet is on that podcast as well. So now we come to the last question and I have that for you Ben, you talked about the challenges faced by brands, marketeers when talking about sustainability, how do you think marketers should navigate that sustainability trend for this new decade, a new post Covid world, do you think in terms of taking action or maybe making changes in business models or more?
Ben: I think it starts internally, and kind of reminding ourselves that as brand builders and communications specialists, one thing we do is we help companies understand why they exist, why the exist for the people that work there, and I think if you look at any of the organisations who are having any success in this space, it’s coming from genuine shifts that have happened internally driven by clear leadership and clear communication. So we talk about Unilever and Ikea a lot and I think it’s interesting that someone like Tesco, where Dave Lewis came in, ex Unilever, seven years ago and started to embed principles internally, particularly by actually just getting the organisation to step away from the day to day and think about ‘why are we here’, kind of really getting into and I think people often stayed in a Norfolk holiday cottage and talked about ‘what’s wrong with food in people’s lives’, so really embedding that sense of what the impact needed, and then looking at Tesco’s the way they then partnered with organisations like WWF to look at how they can halve the impact of a shopping basket and then looking at ways to drive consumer participation with that proposition. So I think there’s a sense of you’ve got to start internally, you’ve got to get your leadership aligned, in the same way that Matt was talking about the Advertising Association it started with a clear articulation of purpose and obviously marketing has a massive role to do this, this is what we do we help brands work out why they exist and how to communicate that internally and then bringing wider stakeholders and consumers into the mix on that.
So, I think that’s the kind of first step, and then the other way in which the new climate paradigms helps marketing I think is the science based targets thing, what we are seeing is organisations making very bold, ambitious goals and putting them out there, with no idea about how they are going to achieve them. So for example Lego saying ‘we’re going to have no oil in our bricks from 2030, we don’t know how we are going to do that, we’re going to do it through innovation and through partnership’ (laughs), but by putting the goal out there then the work begins about how to we do that and who do we bring in. And if you think about creative organisations, the innovational organisations that we are, we can have a massive role now that that target has been set, we can come in and go ‘ok we can help you now’.
If you are trying to double your profits while halving your emissions, we are the kind of business that can help you do that. So in a period where there is so much uncertainty around the future, and so much lack of clarity around what organisations are trying to achieve, I think if we can use these targets that have been put out there, and use them as a reason to go and have a new kind of conversation with clients, where we say ok we are the partners that can help you on the road to achieving these shifts.
Sonoo: Brilliant that was a fascinating conversation, and also trust the strategy guy to nick all my best lines as well …. Thank you all of you. Of course we are talking about a massive role of the advertising industry, starting with a clear articulation of purpose around science based targets, and as both Harriet and Matt have said, the conversation is just beginning.
Thank you to our guests, Ben Essen from Iris, Matt Bourn from the Advertising Association and Harriet Kingaby from the Conscious Advertising Network.
Also a big thank you to our friends Marshall Street Editors and The Nerve.
Thank you everyone for listening and bye bye.