SERIES 2 EPISODE 1 - CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY
TRANSCRIPT
Ete Davies - COO, Dentsu Creative
Jake Dubbins – Co-Founder, The Conscious Advertising Network
Stephen Woodford – CEO, The Advertising Association
Suzie Rook – Head of Brand and Design, SSE plc
ETE: Hello and welcome to Conscious Thinking, the podcast for The Conscious Advertising Network.
I'm your host, Ete Davies, Chief Operating Officer across EMEA for Dentsu Creative.
Today I'm joined by Jake Dubbins - Founder of The Conscious Advertising Network,
Anna Lungley - Chief Sustainability Officer for Dentsu International,
Suzie Rook - Head of Group and Brand Design at SSE PLC and
Stephen Woodford – CEO of The Advertising Association.
Music break.
With COP27 fast approaching in this episode we discuss what, if any, meaningful progress our industry has made towards climate and sustainability accountability over the last year. Welcome everybody, it’s good to have you with us today, this is a significant and substantial topic to talk about, so we’ll dive straight in and I'll start with you Jake.
Cast your mind back to November 9th 2021, CAN has just published it’s open letter ahead of COP26 for global action to tackle climate misinformation and disinformation, what was the reaction at the time from the industry when you published that letter? Specifically, those you name in the COP26 presidency, the CEOs of social and tech platforms that you directly speak to and what's been the continued progress to the requests made in the letter?
JAKE: Yeah I think the reaction was really good. I mean, we thought we knew the reaction from actual CAN members would be good, because we talked about it and consulted beforehand, but we were, I guess, pretty bowled over by the support that it got from the climate experts as well. So, within business, SSE, Virgin Media, O2 supported it, as did Sky. And SSE and Sky were both principal partners of COP26, but we were also then supported by one of the key architects of the Paris Climate Agreement, a lady call Laurence Tubiana, a guy called Bill Hare who won a Nobel Prize for his work with the IPCC, we also then got support of cultural figures like Massive Attack and so on, so all of those different groups – what we’ve always tried to do with The Conscious Advertising Network is build a big tent - so we delivered on that with the letter, so it was very well received. And again, just to kind of ground it in the context, with Laurence Tubiana supporting it, obviously the Paris Climate Agreement says that we need to aim for 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming and still we're not on track for that and I don't think most people understand that we're on track for 2.4 to 2.7 degrees as it stands and that's with the pledges that were made at COP26. So misinformation is an emerging well known threat, the IPCC in its February report talked about misinformation being a key blocker to climate action and maintaining the status quo and it also talked about that we have a rapidly closing window to a liveable future, so I kind of always dwell on those words – a liveable future - I think that's a terrifying phrase, so that's how it was received at the time and the gravity of the subject that we're discussing is vast and since then we've seen some great progress.
We worked closely with Google to co-author the first ever global climate misinformation policy across all of their products and services that launched at COP, Pinterest adopted pretty much the whole of the universal definition that we've put in our latest climate manifesto globally both for content and ads, and Twitter have also taken steps in ads as well, so it's really gaining traction. We’ve briefed multiple UN agencies, UNFCCC, IPCC, World Meteorological Organisation, the Secretary General's team as well and everybody is seeing this issue as one of the key blockers to the climate action that we all need.
ETE: I think you are so right in what you say that it needs the partnership of civil society, public office, public institutions as well as the private sector. That was one of the things that really stood out for me at COP26, to tackle this challenge, as you say as within the CAN manifesto, it’s the defining issue of our times and battling misinformation but also education actually about how far on or off track we are, sort of addressing that. And Stephen, I know that with Ad Net Zero and the Advertising Association, one of the driving initiatives behind that is to help build behaviour change and drive education around how we become more climate conscious and more sustainable in what we make and how we make it.
Now again, going back to, as you say, a liveable situation and it being a defining issue of our times. With many of the recent challenges that we've seen, we have seen national involvement and national resources dedicated towards advertising that drive behaviour change or battle misinformation - we saw it recently with vaccine hesitancy - do you think that we should be seeing more at a national level, more involvement from government to support advertising campaigns in the industry to battle misinformation with dedicated resources, or is this really primarily always a responsibility of our industry and those within the private sector given our relationship with consumption that is part of the root causes of environmental impact?
STEPHEN: I think first and foremost we have to get our own house in order, just calling for Government action if we weren't taking action, I think would be almost like an aggregation of our responsibility and I think whenever you read anything about what a business or any entity should do in the face of challenge is first of all to get your own house in order, make sure what you are doing, what you need to do in your business or in your life, whatever sort of organisation you are. The start point for Ad Net Zero was really about getting our own house in order and we got to that, not in the initial discussion, we were initially talking about the messaging and the content of the advertising but we soon realised that actually there’s a sort of hypocrisy if you like, in terms of just saying to the advertisers ‘get your house in order’ when our ecosystem also needs to get it’s house in order and we don't know what the carbon footprint of the global advertising industry is, but the number that we estimate is between 50 and 60 million tonnes, so if you think about the end to end journey of creating, making, placing, distributing advertising - let's say it's in that order of magnitude we may be out by 10 or 20 million but that's a big number, there are plenty of businesses in our industry that have gone from whatever their footprint was, reduced it by 80-90% by just taking action and really addressing all the issues in their supply chains, and most of the big businesses in our industry have also set their own objectives, their own pathways to net zero for their operations. So, we can see that there is a big desire to get our house in order – Ad Net Zero started in the UK, we announced in Cannes (a different Cannes, the other one in the south of France) in the summer with support from companies like Dentsu, that we're going to extend that programme globally.
So, we’ve currently got 10 businesses that have joined that programme – so all of the big six agency holding companies, Google, Meta, Unilever and Sky. We’re talking to another 8 or 9 companies about joining that, and hopefully we’ll have round about twenty global organisations in our industry that are committed to getting our house in order globally. And if you think about the UK’s 5% of global ad spend - US is 40%, so we have to make this work in the US if we are going to start making a difference in our industry. But I think the really big opportunity, and the big challenge in a sense, is the messaging that we produce on behalf of every sector of industry. We’ve just started over the last year, tracking adspend in big emitting categories, so if you take food, a big part of the emissions in the economy is food production, distribution and consumption. In fact, I heard yesterday that food waste alone, if it were a country, would be the third biggest country in terms of emissions – which is why things like Podbox and all these things that reuse food that would have been chucked away, are so good.
So, we’ve looked at those categories, and looked at the growing spend in those categories, that is supporting low carbon, no carbon, alternatives. And a really good example is the car industry, which is going through the most rapid transition. So obviously transport is, I think, the biggest single category of emissions in terms of consumption, I think it’s round about 20%, of which personal transport through cars is a big big part of. The ad spend on car advertising in 2022 in the UK will be 70% for EV’s and hybrids, and that’s about one in six sales, so the ad spend is way way ahead of the sales. And of course, those manufacturers all know that in 2030 they are not going to sell any more petrol or diesel cars. So, whatever happens with the oil price and the rest of it, all the current dramas that we are living through, demand is going to fall because the vehicles are going to gradually start declining as a share of market. Each car lasts on average 14 years, so those last few petrol and diesel cars that will be last cars sold in 2019, they are going to be off the road by 2035 or so, so you can see that transitions happening. So that cars is the most pronounced, we’re looking at similar data in other big markets. I’d imagine France, Germany and America will probably be the same, so we are seeing that transition.
But in a way, transition in terms of the messaging, that’s a case of it going ahead of the change of the market.
So, when markets are on that transition, we saw in the case of food advertising for example, a huge rise in spend in meat free alternatives, either meat free meats or promoting plant-based meals, and of course we’ve seen a massive rise in the consumption of non-meat – so you can see in these big, high emitting parts of the economy, we’re seeing change happen. But it can really only go at the pace of the change of technology in those industries and I think the interesting thing coming onto the role of government – I think the UK government is not alone in setting 2030 as a cut-off date for new petrol and diesel – but that has really helped accelerate that change. And I don’t know whether you remember back to when it was announced? It was announced and you might have thought that this announcement is going to cause uproar in the car industry, but of course not a bit of uproar because they already knew that they were going to do it. And I think that this is role of government is to set ambitions and parameters for societal and economic change, and the car industry is a fantastic example of that.
ETE: Absolutely, I think that I completely agree with you in terms of government setting ambition, but equally as important is the demand generation from the consumer side, and your point around the automotive industry and fast food, we’ve seen many of the fast food restaurants shifting their menus to being plant based, many of the automotive companies are looking at mobility as a service and a solution, which is beyond car ownership, and a more sustainable way of their moving their businesses going forwards. So, there is innovation opportunity for businesses there, if you embrace the cultural drive that is changing those demands, that is also enabled as you say by government ambition and view on regulation, and then critically messaging to support that change in behaviour.
STEPHEN: I don’t know whether you saw it, probably about a year ago there was a report by the Tony Blair Institute called Planes, Automobiles and Homes, and it was basically calling for widespread education of the public about the changes that are going to need to happen. And they are very significant, but they’re not like the end of the modern way of life. We’re going to have to fly much much less, but it doesn’t mean you can never fly, and I remember that we had a meeting about a year ago with the airline industry trade body, and they’re on their own pathway, can you imagine how hard that is, for basically a fossil-fuel powered industry, but they know that they won’t have a sustainable business if they don’t make a transition to non-fossil fuel powered air travel. Because people won’t do it, or it will be taxed out of existence or it will become socially unacceptable. So even the most heavily entrenched industry in terms of burning hydrocarbons knows that it going to change and has identified the route. And we were all looking at this guy speaking from the airline industry and we were all thinking how on earth are you going to do that, and he was here’s what’s already happened … we are going to have hydrogen powered planes or whatever the technology’s going to be. I heard this morning, there was a fantastic Harvard psychologist on the radio this morning called Professor Pinker, and when the Today programme gets so gloomy that they can’t go on, they bring him out to sort of have a little bit of balance, and he was saying that entropy means that everything always gets worse, you know it’s one of the physical laws of nature and it’s the great ingenuity of human beings is that they intervene to stop things getting worse. And I think that innovation that we’re seeing in things like the car industry or in foods – who’d have thought that McDonalds would be putting so much money behind the plant-burger and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried them, they’re really good – so if you didn’t know it was called McPlant you would never know – so, you see this change and this ingenuity that was responding to the problem, so I think the more you look at it, in a way the more you think ultimately that if governments set the right ambitions and let loose the competitive innovative forces of businesses to compete their way to do these things …. I heard a great phrase that was about pre-competitive collaboration and Ad Net Zero was a really good example of pre-competitive collaboration, it’s the industry coming together, all of the big six holding companies coming together to say that there are things we need to do collectively so that we are all on the same direction of travel, we’re all working towards the same thing, and then we’ll compete like hell to get there quicker, better, more impressively on behalf of our clients. And I think that’s a really nice phrase for a lot of the industries they are looking at that pre-competitive collaboration to address these big challenges.
ETE: Pre-competitive collaboration, that’s one I’ll take back to the agency (SW: yeah I’ve used it a lot since I heard it!).
Music break.
ETE: I want to come back to something that you said at the very beginning as well, you said about getting your house in order really. Every industry, many of the ones that you’ve described, to get to that point of innovation, has actually had to look deeply internally at its processes, its value chain and to the future that faces it. And so then coming to you Anna in a business as vast as Dentsu, a global organisation spanning many many markets, where there is often different cultural and societal government attitudes towards climate change and sustainability, how do you drive collective progress, to Stephen’s point, across a business as vast and diverse as that? How do you maintain success and critically accountability?
ANNA: It’s a really good question. And I think it applies to many organisations, and just before I answer it, I just want to build for a moment on Stephen’s point there, that Dentsu International is a UK headquartered company and the UK was the first country in the world to set a net zero target and ambition, and as a result we have our carbon budgets. So, we’ve seen the policy change that results, on the back of that automotive being a fantastic example, and we’ve seen how clients and brands have responded to that. That’s a huge opportunity for business transformation and innovation and the revenue opportunities associated with the stg’s in this sector alone is valued at about eleven trillion dollars by 2030. So, there’s pre-competitive collaboration, it’s the right concept because the pie is big enough for everyone, but it also gives us a huge competitive advantage because we know the change that’s going to happen, for example in the US, as we are already living it here. So, actually we have the opportunity to work with global brands and brands in other countries to really help guide that transition and really get ahead of the curve, I think that’s important. And that’s, going back to your question about how do you make that happen in a market or a company like Dentsu. Dentsu is 60,000 people, we operate in 145 markets, we probably speak a similar number of languages, but really when you approach sustainability within the corporate context it is a business transformation agenda, and just like any other business transformation agenda you have to build the enabling environment, you have to build the right culture to make that change. And for me that always starts with four things and first is that compelling narrative, so when you go into the organisation it’s exciting and inspiring people around the opportunity to make that change, and I think quite often we talk about the climate crisis, it is the climate crisis and it quite be quite depressing when you’re thinking about the air that you breathe, the water that you drink, the food that you need to survive, but actually within our industry advertising has been part of the problem historically, but we are a huge part of the solution and we should not underestimate that. And the IPCC report talks about the change that needs to be made to achieve net zero and for a long time we recognised that we need infrastructural decarbonisation and we know that there are big industries like cement and steel that we need to tackle, food – food waste being a huge one, but actually in April their latest report talked about demand side mitigation or demand side activation, which is basically the pull for low-carbon product lifestyles. And what they said was that this had been massively underestimated in strategies to date, and potentially could deliver up to 70% of the emissions reduction needed to achieve net zero.
And that demand side activation is driven by marketing. It’s driven by advertising. So, at this point this industry becomes a massive part of the solution and I think that’s a huge opportunity and for us driving that change in Dentsu starting, is helping people understand that actually if you are creative, if you are innovative, if you really want to be part of the solution then this is actually the sweet spot and the perfect place to be. So, I think creating that compelling narrative is really important.
The second thing is role modelling. This has to be driven by leadership, it has to be driven by the c-suite, it can’t be driven by the sustainability team. And we are very lucky in that we have a CEO who’s very enlightened, Wendy Clark sits on the CEO of World Economic Forum CEO Climate Alliance, she’s very personally passionate about this agenda, she has three young children she has to answer to, so she is very much thinking about the future and wants to do the right thing. Our Japanese heritage as well. The Japanese mindset is very much around, they talk about medicine – Eastern and Western medicine - it's very much about treating the cause and not the symptom. So, it’s really looking in the long term and because we’re Japanese we have a 100-term / year plan as well as a three-year plan, so it’s really taking that long term view. And that helps, having an enlightened leadership driven from the c-suite is really really important.
And the third thing is scales. And I know the (CAN) manifesto talks about this, and I can’t underestimate this enough.
Your board, your executive teams, have to be climate competent, your people have to be climate competent, and we’ve invested really really heavily in upscaling and training our people starting with the board. So actually we work very closely with the University of Cambridge, we’ve had people in to meet with our board members, we’ve had people going through online training, not just our marketeers, we have people on the sustainable supply chain course, we have people on the sustainable finance course, so people are really trying to deeply understand this agenda so that they are informed and educated, and can understand the change and really importantly how they can be a part of that.
And then the fourth thing, and I think the (CAN) manifesto really majors on this, is the reinforcement mechanisms and making it real. So, I think I’ve seen faster movement within Dentsu since we tied our executive bonuses to ESG. I can strongly recommend it. But we’ve also tied £500m of revolving credit as well, so long term financing against metrics related to decarbonisation, against scope one and two and scope three but also gender equality as well, we have an afex and compliance gateway. So really trying to put those reinforcement mechanisms in place, and if you have those four elements in place in any business, whether you’re a ten person business or a ten thousand person business, you can really start to see that senior change being driven from the top, all the way through the business, every function, every service line and that’s been really key. And it’s really important because we are one of the first companies in the world to set their net zero target and have it approved by the Science Based Targets initiative. And that means we have to change everything within our business, it means reducing flights by 65%, it means reducing technology by about 70%, so we have to change out the way that we work.
ETE: It sort of goes back to that old adage you said of really ‘putting your money where your mouth is’ with those reinforcement mechanisms, because you’re then baking it integrally into the business, and keeping everybody focussed on the objectives intrinsically.
Music break.
ETE: Suzie coming on to you on the brand side, talk us through some of the things that SSE have been doing to deliver on CAN Climate manifestos as an organisation, as one of their leading energy companies as part of the network. How are you working in partnership with your agencies, and what are some of the initiatives that you’ve been driving as a business to deliver on the climate change manifesto?
SUZIE: Yes I think that brands have a really important role to play in this, and obviously we work very closely with CAN, for the last couple of years, we’ve learnt huge amounts about us that our marketing have not thought about before. But we also work really collaboratively with our agencies, and what Stephen and Anna were saying about working collaboration is really really important, to get everybody’s house in order and that might just be very practical steps about sitting down and saying we’ve got a shoot coming up, do we need to travel, does everybody need to travel, could we actually reuse what we ran last year or are there materials out there so we don’t actually even need to do the shoot, through to making sure that you are going to offset your carbon emissions. To much bigger things, we have lots of different businesses that sit within SSE – so I’m working with different marketing teams to talk to them about the sort of work that the advertising networks does, to really think about their advertising practices, and that could be anything from are they thinking about the person in their ad, are they riding around on a bicycle or are they driving a diesel car, but also look at some of the tools, particularly from the Climate manifesto, and if you go into the Conscious Advertising website and look at the Climate & Sustainability manifesto there are some really great tips and tools that you can be sharing with your teams internally, things that they can be doing.
Some of the things that SSE have done last year in the run up to COP27 (meant 26), we wanted to engage our employees much more in what was going on, they couldn’t all be there but we wanted them to feel part of it and we partnered with a supply chain sustainability school and they ran a climate academy for us – it was six sessions employees could dial in and listen to and learn more about sustainability, even though we are quite a sustainable organisation in terms of the product that we have, there’s still a lot of work to do with employees to make them understand what they can do about it.
So, we’ve got quite a lot of partnerships like that, SSE are part of the race to net zero which is obviously a UN backed campaign to take action to reduce emissions and are held accountable to Science Based Targets, like Anna was saying. So there is quite a lot of work internally – and then just in the last two years, I’ve sat down with our media and creative agencies, we just did a creative agency pitch last year and made sure in the RFP that sustainability was an important part of anybody winning that business, that they supported what we wanted to do with the Conscious Advertising Network and we really scrutinised their sustainability credentials and whether they were serious, because a lot of people can talk about it but actually you need to put your money where your mouth is and show what you are doing about it. And since we’ve taken on board that agency, which was Iris, we’ve had several meetings with them and worked out what are they doing, what are we doing, what can we do better together to be a lot more climate conscious. And I guess the thing I would say it that there’s a long way to go!
There’s so much you could do, it can feel quite overwhelming, but actually even just small steps are really important and just having those conversations with your agencies – I sat down with my media agency and said we need to look at our brand safety blocklists, what does that even mean and what do we have? Actually, it was a really interesting exercise as they say quite often clients don’t even bother to ask but you could be, for example, excluding works like climate in your brand safety or things that you want to actually make sure that you are advertising, so there are very basic things that you can do.
I guess the other thing that SSE has done, and we don’t have huge budgets, we don’t spend huge budgets on advertising, but when we do do advertising we think about it very carefully. We make sure that we are advertising and funding quality journalism and making sure that where our advertising is going it’s not going to hopefully fund misinformation/disinformation, so it’s just working through very carefully your media strategy and planning.
ETE: Yeah it’s a really that theme of collaboration again and what it can lead to in terms of innovation and partnership obviously keeps coming through and Jake I know in previous discussions as Suzy just mentioned, that bit around getting back to quality in media planning, you’ve got some particularly strong views around that, and how it’s a central part of conscious advertising in and of itself.
JAKE: Yes, I mean within the Conscious Advertising Network, the mission is both to break the economic model of advertising funding polarising content, content that divides us from genuine hate speech or incitement to violence. In the case of NGOs that we’re talking to in India, actual genocidal content. So it’s confronting that, and so therefore in this context confronting advertising funding outright climate misinformation and we define and worked with 20 climate or NGOs and disinformation experts to put together this unified definition that was in the open letter that has three areas: outright denial, which is it doesn’t exist or it’s a hoax not caused by humans; cherry picking, this glacier is not retreating so therefore there is no climate change; and also false solutions – that somehow digging loads more oil is going to solve this problem. So there’s three aspects to that.
If we let our advertising go across 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 websites that we don’t know where that it, we are (and have – we’ve got so much evidence across the open web, across social platforms and also in some broadcast and more mainstream media) of that advertising funding outright denial. Recently we had a well-known newspaper talking about an opinion piece, we can disagree with opinion pieces, but if it says that there is no evidence to suggest that the climate has changed beyond historical fluctuations, that is outright denial. So, it’s about going back to good old media planning and understanding what your brand to sit next to, it’s not just the context and investing in good quality media, and quality media can be something that has only 10,000 unique users a month for example, but that can still be quality it’s not necessarily size, but also that what are you funding? NewsGuard and Comscorel did a piece of research saying that 2.6bn is being sent from big brands to misinformation websites. And Global Disinformation index also do a lot of studies that millions and millions of pounds to the economic model that we are trying to confront, where made for advertising sites, misinformation sites and certainly with our other manifestos, sites that incite violence, it’s an economic model, where our money is funding that stuff.
ETE: It’s sort of fuel end funded and coming back to that point of consciously thinking about what it is that you are either directly or indirectly funding.
JAKE: Exactly, and one of the things that we’re working hard on is problem definition and collaborating with experts in the field to better define, and use the precision of language is so important, because if you ask multiple people ‘what do you mean by climate misinformation’ and we’ve asked all of the platforms, you’ll get a different answer .. we define it like we don’t define it or other people define it. And so, it’s really important as we’re all talking about collaborating on effectively the biggest brief of our lives, because this is affecting every single one of us and going to affect every single one of us in this room, in this city, in this country in this world. You know it is about problem definition and then all collaborating together on that problem, because that’s where we’re going to get the best solutions.
Music break.
ETE: We probably all saw Greenpeace’s demonstrations at Cannes earlier on this year, it grabbed headlines, generated much needed conversation around sustainability and our industry’s role and responsibility around what we make and how we make it. One area of conversation that it did spark was the ongoing relationship and journey that many businesses within our industry have with fossil fuel companies or with other companies that have significant environmental impact. The debate calls between should agencies, should the industry take a stance on working with such companies or shouldn’t it, and to Suzy’s point earlier on, many agencies are pushing towards SBTs and being evaluated in pitches or in new business opportunities around the authenticity and the credibility of their own sustainability commitments. The question is, is it time the industry took a collective step around working with fossil fuel companies or companies that have a significant environmental impact or is that just an over simplistic approach to the challenge that we face with the themes of partnership that we’ve mentioned before? It’s quite an open question, I’ll put that to you first Stephen (at the Ad Association) and I’d like to ask you as an agency leader Jake.
STEPHEN: I think one of the things we have to look to, particularly as an industry body, is what’s the freedom if you like to put out misinformation, what’s the freedom to greenwash or not. And I think obviously in the UK and in most other developed markets, there are content regulators in place. So, the ASA is obviously the one here, but if you look across Europe, they are all pretty much of an ASA type organisation, and they are very collaborative as a group, they are called SRO’s (self-regulatory organisations) across Europe. And they collaborate intensively on particularly these highly controversial areas – environmental claims would be a very controversial area along with things like HSFS foods or alcohol or gambling – things that affect us socially, are potentially harmful or have social consequences if they are misused. So, all of these things are very tightly regulated. The ASA here, the UK’s regulator, conducted all throughout 2021 a review of the rules that they have in place. They didn’t actually change the rules because they felt that in all the consultation that they did across the industry and with all the various stakeholders they wanted to contribute in open public consultation, they felt that the rules were tight enough but they changed the guidance around the rules. And the rules when you look at them are pretty substantial, I’ve got them here in front of me, but things like using a cradle to grave assessment when you are thinking about a product or service’s environmental impact. Don’t mislead on the environmental benefit of a product service. So actually, when you look at the claims that are actually upheld, they tended to be for overly broad claims and actually mainly from food and drink companies and other categories that you wouldn’t immediately think of as greenwashing. So, the rules are pretty tight on what you can and can’t claim and how you can position your company’s activities, and I think it’s particularly true of oil and gas companies is the context that you put around the advertising that you do. And I think a very high profile recent BP campaign is a really good example – they are talking about obviously their investment in UK sustainable energy in all its different forms, but one of the things that really struck me about the posters and the press ads that I saw, and I had a look this morning at their social media (Meta have this fantastic library as you know of all the ads) is you can actually see how they are contextualising their claims and the one that springs to mind about their press ads is they talk about their investment, I think they are promising up to 18bn up to 2030, and it’s going to be 40% of their investment by 2025 I think are their key claims, and there’s lots of blogs and stuff with their chief executive and so on, that link off the advertising. But they actually put a paragraph of copy in there saying, and I can’t remember exactly the wording, saying ‘to be clear we are still investing the majority of our money in oil and gas, because that’s what the world is running on at the moment’. And, you know, as recent events have shown we are all suffering from an incredibly difficult situation on that supply. So, their argument would be that the world is making a transition, we’re going to be part of that transition, otherwise we don’t have much of a business after 2050, but in the meantime we’ve got to supply secure and affordable energy to run people’s lives at the moment. The news is wall to wall about the difficulties that we are in at the moment because of the Ukraine war, so it’s a really difficult area. And this is not an AA policy view, but my personal view is, if I were running an agency, I would look very deeply if you like at the strategy and the commitments that any high carbon advertiser, whether it’s an oil or gas company or any energy company, is making, and I would probably if I am a public company need to be accountable for that, because my shareholders would also be asking me these questions. The pressures on every business to change, to become sustainable are, I would imagine, and I don’t know anybody who works at an oil and gas company but I would imagine that they are more acutely felt in those organisations than any. And you know if they are making claims they have to stand up to first of all pretty strict guidance on the claims that they make, and interestingly looking at the most recent claims, the most recent complaint about an oil company was in 2020, and you can imagine that every time as an oil or gas company that you put an ad out it’s going to be scrutinised, rightly so, by all the various pressure groups.
JAKE: I was going to say that I think that they are going to be scrutinised, rightly by pressure groups, and the original question was about Greenpeace at Cannes, and I thought it was really unfortunate, it was well received that work actually by a lot of the industry and I think it was a pity that the guy who gave his Lion back was then kicked out. And I think that one of the things that we would advocate for is don’t kick Greenpeace out put them on stage – the activists and the NGOs have actually been right on this stuff for years. Everybody will remember that this was not an issue in the next decade for us, as far as we understood it fifteen/twenty years ago, if we’ve got to halve our emissions by 2030 one of the things that I feel very strongly and emotionally about is that my kids are going to be 15 and 18 at that point and I’ve got to answer to their questions, what did you do dad, you knew? And that horizon has come at us very very quickly, so I think that that’s changed.
I just want to pick up on the controversial point, because I don’t think climate is controversial, it’s sometimes been turned into something which is in politics, yes of course we need policy to deal with it, but the latest IPCC reports talk about this being unprecedented and human influence being unequivocal, and that is due to greenhouse gas emissions mainly from fossil fuels but from food production and others. So, I don’t think the science isn’t controversial, there is consensus, it’s about how we deal with that.
STEPHEN: I was thinking more of, certainly our industries, having a huge internal debate as much as anything else about what it’s position should be in relation to high carbon industries (JAKE: Yes that’s fair), it’s not the science that is controversial it’s the fact that there’s a really good debate actually about it. From when I’ve talked to people in agencies around this, they are all very much reflecting on that in terms of their own policies, they are probably getting pressure from their own shareholders and staff and other stakeholders.
JAKE: Ete talked and asked about us as an agency, and the stuff that we do at Media Bounty, we’ve set our stall out very early and set ourselves up as an ethical agency and we’ve got to walk the walk and we do. We’ve turned down oil and gas, we’ve recently turned down two fast fashion brands that are very well known, we’ve turned down pesticides, we’ve turned down gambling, we’ve turned down a lot of different stuff and you know if we’d taken it on we’d be much bigger and much more profitable I’m sure, so it does obviously kick us in the wallet. But back the questions that my kids have. I think hopefully another kind of phrase is that we treat with radical pragmatism when we turn these businesses down, we do ask what are your plans to align to the Paris Climate Agreement? And if they say duh and look over there, then you know we won’t touch them with a barge pole. I’m very much a believer that there are plenty of other organisations looking at historical problems – you may have seen the Big Oil Vs The World documentary on the BBC which is well worth watching – you know we are too late for that, we need solutions now and business has to be a massive part of that. So, the BP campaign, when it’s talking about 40% investment / 18bn, that’s fine, but if it’s aligned to 1.5-2 degrees - if it’s not it’s just big numbers, there’s no getting away from that. So, we have a fairly stringent criteria that we work with, and there are five points to that - we do our own research, we look at the ethical consumer, we look at what’s publicly available, and if we’re not sure we will speak to experts in the industry. So with the fast fashion example we spoke to experts within that industry about what they thought of that particular organisation – we talk to our team, because we don’t want to go ‘here you go, here’s something that you really don’t want to work on’ and so we consult with our team and actually when briefs do come in to us some of our team go ‘no thanks’ and that’s actually brilliant for us because that makes it even easier for us to go well actually we’re not touching that with a barge pole. We’ll then talk to the client directly and say are we unaware of big plans that you have to align to Science Based Targets, the race to net zero and the Paris Climate Agreement, and again if the answer is actually we do and here it is, great then again we’ll consider that. That hasn’t been forthcoming yet, I’d have to say. And then obviously from an organisation we’ve got to like I said walk the walk, we’ve got to look at our own reputation as well, Our reputation both from our current clients, but like I said our team as well and decide what’s best for the agency.
So I do think that there’s a collective point, is an interesting one and we might get in trouble with competition there, but I genuinely think that if an organisation is not aligned to Paris, some of the agencies that move first – and it won’t be easy at all – but some of those that move first to say we’re not going to work with some organisations, whether they be oil and gas or whether they be from anyone else that isn’t aligned to Paris, will have a competitive advantage because this is the only game in town. Like I said right at the start, we’re on track to 2.4 to 2.7 so we’ve got to do a lot more than we’ve been doing to get to this point.
ANNA: Yes and I’ll just build on that, actually Jake, I think it is really important to invite the activists in as well, because then you can hold the mirror up to the organisation and potentially recognise your blind spots. And when we were developing Dentsu’s 2030 strategy we brought Extinction Rebellion, we brought Greenpeace in and asked them what they felt the industry needed to be doing. And I think that we need to recognise that organisations like that have really helped to raise the profile and shift this agenda. And Client Earth, that sued BP for that advert, they won and that advert was removed, and I think what’s really interesting numbers aside, if you really look at the data they were positioning themselves in that advert as a renewable energy company when 96% of the investment was going on fossil fuels. That’s greenwashing any way that you look at it, that is greenwashing and that’s dangerous. And I think that’s something that we need to recognise when organisations greenwash it does cloud the issue on a global level it prevents us from seeing the progress that we are making from net zero on what we need to do and that puts the whole of humanity and lives at stake, billions of lives at stake. So that’s something we need to be really super alert for.
In answer to your question Ete about whether or not we need a standard approach across industry, I don’t think that it’s a one size fits all, I think it’s a very complicated space. I think we need to recognise that there are some organisations that actively greenwash, potentially deliberately, there are some that do it accidentally because they don’t understand. And Stephen’s point about cradle to grave, Innocent recently got in trouble for a really good product in a plastic bottle, they hadn’t thought about the end to end implications of that and so I think it comes back to the education and up skilling piece. But we do need to recognise that actually there are organisations that have fundamentally transformed their business models. 2050 is too late, but it only took Orsted ten years to move from a fossil fuel company to a renewable energy company; it took Royal DSM ten years to transition from a mining company to a diversified business. So, business transformation can happen at a much more accelerated pace and where an organisation is committed to make that transition, from Dentsu’s perspective, we will absolutely lean in to help them to accelerate because we think it’s the right thing to do, and I think that’s really important. There are questions you can ask, and actually the (CAN) manifesto has a load of brilliant questions in, that you can ask your clients and some of them we’ve talked about – do you have a Science Based Target, is it Paris aligned, do you disclose via CDP, there are some very simple questions which will very quickly get to the route of whether or not an organisation is acting authentically. Even, where does your sustainability team sit within the organisation? Does your brand team talk to them? You know because really helping to understand whether those two agendas are connected that’s really important as well.
At Dentsu this is a live conversation at the global executive. We have resigned clients; we have declined new business. In one case, exactly as Jake said, we actually had people stood up and said ‘no thank you I don’t want to work on that client’ and I think we need to recognise that that will happen more. The next generation, we are in the middle of a talent war and people want to work for purpose-led organisations and they will choose to go to ethical media organisations because they will want to work on solutions. So, I think that’s something we are very very aware of. And we also need to recognise that this is complex, as an exec team we talk about the importance of flexing our ethical muscle; we need to look at the social and environmental implications and also need to look at the commercial implications. Because as Jake says, it does come at a cost if you walk away from business and you need to be prepared to do that, you need to be comfortable that that’s the right thing and you need to be aligned as a team as well when you do that. So, I don’t think there’s a one size fits all, but I do think, to quote the front page of the (CAN) manifesto ‘it’s time to pick a side’ and I think as an industry we really need to be thinking do we want to be on the right side of the future or not?
STEPHEN: I think that’s a really good point to think, because the right side of the future there’s obviously debate and misinformation out there, but increasingly it feels like the business world is on the right side of this. The direction of travel is on the right side of this. One of the things, and I only went to a COP for the first time in Glasgow, but I was talking to somebody who had been to ten of them or something like that, and she was saying that the really big difference about COP26 was that the business world was there in force and CEO’s were there, not just sustainability leads, and there was real, quite profound, engagement across the whole spectrum of the economy in the change, and I think that’s something that ultimately this becomes, there’s an inexorability about this that consumer power, employee power, shareholder pressure, all the things are all pointing in the same direction. Government legislation, the rules around claims that you can make etc, all of this. If your company was thinking we are going to plough our commercial success and our future on greenwashing, misleading and winging it, you might want to do that (laughs) but it’s a high-risk strategy I would say.
(JAKE: It’s higher risk than it used to be, it worked 25 years ago, but it can’t work now). And I think that documentary is a really good example of an industry that is, and I’m not going to go into naming names, but there was one particular offender I think in that, that shareholder pressure was forced to change and they were most resistant to change.
They are changing because their shareholders had enough, you need to do this because you are on the wrong side of history and I think that’s a great thing here. We know from research that we did from right before we launched Ad Net Zero, obviously we had a very engaged group of people from our members thinking around the challenges around this.
To that point about Extinction Rebellion, it was around that time we had our first meeting, the Oxford Street takeover and it was very much front and centre of our consciousness in terms of the protest and so on. But one of the things that we did was a piece of research as well, amongst the people working in advertising, and I think it was the number one concern that people had ‘Am I part of the problem’? And then we looked at things that business could do and one of the interesting things was that number one concern flipped almost entirely to a massive driver of employee satisfaction, if they felt and believed that their company was part of the solution. And you’ve been talking about what you’ve been doing at Dentsu and SSE, I would imagine that makes your employees proud to work for your organisations, because they know that whatever they are doing over there, we are on the right side of history here, and I think it’s incredibly important point.
ETE: I want to touch on that point as you mentioned the sort of necessity, either the commercial imperative has been driven by shareholders, by consumers but most importantly also by employees – and that employee drive and activation and just engagement with the necessary business transition change. You talked on it slightly earlier Suzie, and it would be good to hear a bit more from your point of view around that employee groundswell and engagement as you’ve been going through this transformation as a business and delivering on the (CAN) manifesto.
SUZIE: Yeah, SSE has probably got around 12,000 employees and it’s quite interesting actually, they are very proud to work for SSE, but some of them don’t actually feel like they are necessarily playing their part in net zero. They’re just doing their jobs. So actually we’re reaching out to them and saying ‘you’re playing a huge part in net zero’ and to galvanise them, because you know they might move to a different company but we want them to take that enthusiasm and that commitment to net zero, even if you are sat in the office looking at finances you are still playing a massive part in getting to net zero, so I think it’s really important to continue to be engaging your employees and make them realise the difference that they can make.
We look at diversity and diversity of thought, and actually we welcome that and try and encourage people to come in and work for us, because we know that we are going to need that to get to net zero, we can’t just rely on what we’ve already got. So, I think employee engagement is really important and it’s interesting because there are a lot of people, for example, that are coming from oil and gas industries that are now having to convert into renewable energy and we need to support them in that transition (we call it) into more renewable energy. It’s working with people in our company but also attracting new talent and getting them to come and work for us is really important, showing them the importance of what we all need to do. But I would say personally I love working for SSE it’s got an amazing purpose, what they are trying to do is incredible and it’s really really tough. If you can get your employees thinking about that and what role they have to play in getting to net zero then that is part of the success really.
ETE: We are seeing that more and more I think across a whole range of sectors, employee activism and employee power actually driving change as much as consumer activism.
SUZIE: And you can see the younger ones coming through are brilliant. They want to work for companies that are doing positive good things, or else they are not going to come and work for us, if they don’t see that.
JAKE: I think Anna’s point about picking a side and drawing a line, there’s such an opportunity now to do things in a different way, I can’t remember the phrase you used Stephen but it was making pre ? (SW: pre-competitive collaboration), I really like that, but I also think that collaboration on this big problem, and radical collaboration on this big problem, is the critical challenge for us in this industry. Because I think that, like I said, this problem is universal, it’s a problem that is going to affect all of us, all of our families and so on, so I think that bringing the outside in, bringing activists in, genuinely engaging with employees, getting the c-suite climate literacy, climate competency and using the climate language, and government and policy makers and multi-lateral institutions like the UN, holding that coalition together is also a huge job that all of us have responsibility to do, because the science ain’t gonna change, if anything it’s going to get worse and more quickly, so we can’t advertise to science that’s not going to change, so holding that unusual coalition together and holding that spirit of humanity together is going to be this critical thing, whether they be business activists, family, society, employees, industry, government and so on.
Because already what we see is a lot of backsliding misinformation about net zero itself, for example calls to scrap net zero, that siren call of ‘oh it’s just going to be easy and we’ll save all this money if we scrap net zero’ – well we ain’t going to! So, I think that holding that coalition together and focussing on the problem is a critical job for all of us.
Music break.
ETE: That’s a great segway into our final question as we wrap up for time, which I’ll ask around the table. With COP27 fast approaching, what are each of your hopes for the outcome of COP27 as it pertains to what we’ve been discussing with regards to the industry, to misinformation, to employee engagement and I’ll start with you Anna.
ANNA: I would probably just continue to advocate for Science Based Targets, there are too many organisations that don’t have Paris alignment and we’d need to set them. But also, what I’d like to see at COP27 is a price on carbon.
JAKE: We would like to see, we called for it last year, a recognition of a universal definition of climate misinformation for the governments that attend COP but critically in that final decision, because climate misinformation delays climate action, so all of the work, and also the business opportunities, that are in this space are delayed by misinformation. And yes they are delayed in order to potentially prop up the status quo, but I guess a recognition at that level that climate misinformation is a threat, and for it to go into the decision so that countries are also responsible for dealing with that issue.
SUZIE: Well obviously COP27 is a global event and you want everything to happen from a global perspective, but I just hope that we can reignite some of the enthusiasm and activity that happened last year around COP26, because it was based in the UK and everyone was talking about it and it was on the news. And the danger is that this year it’s in Egypt and it’s a lot more distant, so I’m sure a lot of people will still be going to it, but how do we make sure that it’s still talked about and very much front of mind over that period but also in the run up to it.
STEPHEN: Well, I’m going to be very parochial, because we are going to do our second global summit on Ad Net Zero. We did the first one at Glasgow, we were actually in Glasgow at STV’s studios which happened to overlook the whole thing, so we had a lovely backdrop. We’re not going to be overlooking anything in Sharm El Sheik, we will be online from a studio near Regent’s Park actually, so we’ll be live from London but it will be a global, open to anybody, free conference. We had 2,000 people from 35 countries for the first one that was just talking about UK initiative, which I think shows the appetite for this within our industry. We will be global by the time we get to COP27, so we are going to hopefully have this amazing group of companies that have already come together, but maybe another eight or ten companies that are going to come and join us, that are the leading players in our industry globally. I think, just to echo Jake’s point, this coming together, that will be the first time that twenty businesses in our industry have come together I think for anything. I think the big six networks got together around the STGs in Cannes in 2017/18, but twenty businesses from tech through to big advertisers, agency groups, consulting firms and so on, all coming together to really focus on what advertising can do to accelerate the change in the way that our economy works, that helps us change the way we live, and I think that’s an amazing opportunity there. And we won’t get it all right, but we are on our way. And I think going back to this right side of history thing, we are on our way, we are on the journey. We announced the first Ad Net Zero in November 2020 and we had no members and we said we’re going to do a global conference in November 2021 at Glasgow, and hopefully somebody will turn up and hopefully we’ll have some members. We had 100 members and 2000 people in 30 countries. By the time we get to COP27 we’ll have I hope around about 20 organisations and 10,000 people from across our industry around the world come and attend this and we’ll be talking about the progress that we are making. We’ve got some great progress on things, like with our AdGreen production programme, which is being widely used now across the industry, we need to make big progress around media frameworks .. there’s lots of other things we need to do to get our own house in order, we’ll also be looking at the changes happening in the industry’s output. In fact, in October, we will have had the first Campaign Ad Net Zero Awards, so the first awards in our industry that are entirely about sustainability, all awards are in effect about celebrating excellence and showcasing best practice. So that will, I think, hopefully give us some great case histories and things to look at that point the direction of the future. So, I’m much more focused on our little programme that’s becoming a big global programme, so that’s a really exciting thing for us.
ETE: Central to what you’re saying is that the key thing that I’ve taken away from this brilliant discussion is how collaboration is so essential to tackling what really is the defining challenge of our era and of our generation.
So, thank you to our guests, Jake Dubbins, Anna Lungley, Stephen Woodford and Suzie Rook.
Also thank you to our Dentsu Creative editorial and production teams for powering this whole series; The Nerve music library for our soundtrack and to all of you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation you can find lots more like it by subscribing to the series wherever you get your podcasts.
To learn more, go to consciousadnetwork.com/podcasts