Innovating the ways brands are built: Tackling Climate Change in Advertising
The advertising industry: what has that got to do with climate change? Or you could ask: “What has climate change got to do with advertising?” In fact, climate change and advertising are inherently linked. Our business relies on a stable and profitable society where our clients look to us to produce innovative ways of building their brand and marketing their products & services. Climate change significantly disrupts our client’s ability to create their products and the long-term effects on society can be vast. No effect on society can be greater than the very real threat that the islanders of Tuvalu are facing. The island that they live on is only 2m above sea level. With the potential for sea level to rise from 3–6m, the island is expected to be uninhabitable by 2020. Everyone on Tuvalu will be forced to move and will never be able to return to their home. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: this is a small island nation but represents what is predicted to happen in coastal areas and mega-cities across the world. For instance, most of the population of the USA lives on coastal areas. With these cities underwater there will be no business as usual, and no advertising.
Kellogg’s CEO, for instance, discusses the fact that the effects of climate change will call into question the viability of production of the raw materials that they require for their business; global cereal crop yields are expected to decrease 30% as a result of climate change. They are working towards climate resilience and adaption in their agricultural supply chains by helping farmers change practices to reduce their on-farm carbon emissions.
The challenge of climate change not only affects our clients’ business and therefore their wish to engage us as advertisers in business, but also our ability to attract young talent. Younger generations are no longer satisfied with a job that just pays the bills. They are more environmentally aware. They travel and see the impact of climate change on other cultures. They are ecologically-minded and they want to do something about it. But most importantly for us, they want to work for a company that is doing something about it.
IKEA, with an annual turnover of roughly 35.1€ billion, is the largest furniture company in the world. Its founder, Ingvar Kamprad has recently announced that it will invest €1bn (£850m) into recycling projects and forest conservation. It also now sells solar panels in its stores and encourages reuse by making its products adaptable to many scenarios. IKEA can pick and choose the best young talent to work for them, to innovate with them, knowing that it is because of the mission and values that they share and act on.
Leading the way: looking at things differently
Modern advertising can be dated from the Second World War, when a man called Edward Bernays used his Uncle Sigmund Freud’s studies of psychology to develop a way of selling people new things and creating aspirations that they had never dreamed of previously (much to Freud’s disapproval). Ultimately, this created the way we do things today. Bernays tapped into a deeper part of the human psyche to change the way we look at things; facing the threat of climate change as its effects are felt around the world by society and our clients, we too must think of new ways to engage with the public, our staff and our potential employees. By looking at things differently and relearning the way that Bernays used Freud’s studies, we can innovate to a new normal with responsible marketing and sustainable consumption at its heart.
We must take our cue from the scientific community. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that human induced climate change is happening all around us right now and that we must act quickly to prevent significant long-term damage. Governmental leadership followed this in the form of the global environmental agreement signed by nearly 200 country leaders at the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 climate agreement in Paris in 2015. This came into force in less than a year, on the 4th of November 2016 in an unprecedented level of co-operation from governments around the world. It created huge waves of change through the leadership shown: from business, governments and regions, things will never be the same again.
Dentsu Aegis Network is leading the industry as a wholly owned subsidiary of Dentsu Inc.
Dentsu Inc. was recently included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) as one of the most sustainable companies in the world.
But climate change is such a big challenge — how do we communicate it and stimulate the action that’s needed?
Dentsu Aegis Network aims to lead the advertising industry when it comes to our work on climate change: how we work with our colleagues, our clients, and what we do in our supply chain. For Dentsu Aegis Network, the most immediate effect of the Paris Climate Agreement was to set our new Environmental Strategy to build on the success of previous years (a 21% decrease in our carbon footprint per FTE) from 2010–2015. In doing so, we took into account the importance of science based targets and signed up to the Science Based Targets Initiative to assess what our true impact on the planet is. Our new environmental target, as a part of our Future Proof 2020 CSR strategy, is to decrease our carbon footprint by an additional 40% per FTE by 2020. This target will redouble our efforts and commitments to tackle pollution and lead the way in our industry.
In addition, in order to achieve a 40% reduction in our carbon footprint per FTE, we became a member of RE100. This initiative creates collective action for businesses, encouraging commitment to switching to renewable electricity.
Dentsu Aegis has committed to sourcing 100% renewable energy by 2020 across its network.
The challenge we then faced was the value — action gap. We know that people struggle with the enormity of the issue of climate change and that sometimes, whilst their values align with strong climate action, they don’t know how to achieve this on an individual level.
So we created “Keep It Cool”: a global campaign to engage our colleagues around our environmental targets and individual action to solve the value — action gap for them. Providing them with inspiration for small individual action around our environmental targets (sourcing 100% renewable energy globally, reducing our business travel by 25%, reducing our paper use by 25% and reducing our waste and increasing efficiency by 10%) we asked them to make a #mygreenpledge to change something in their daily work life to reduce their own carbon footprint. Some took it further and changed things in their personal lives too.
The leadership that we saw from our C-level colleagues around the world in the campaign solidified our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint as a company. With business travel contributing most to our footprint, we saw a major effort to reducing this from a number of CEOs, who pledged to reduce travel for internal meetings. We encouraged transversal working, not only reducing our carbon footprint, company spend, and improving the time in the office, but also health and wellbeing. In turn, the company benefits through increased productivity of our colleagues.
The greatest and most exciting shift in our history
There is no doubt that everything we do and how we do it will change over the coming years. Advertising and marketing will be at the forefront of that change. However, human nature doesn’t need to change — it’s in our nature to care, collaborate and adapt. Global climate change might just be the biggest environmental challenge that has ever faced our species, but we face that challenge with an innovative and optimistic mind set.
We live in exciting, changing times, where nothing will be the same again. The shift in the way we produce and consume everything, from energy and food, to our clothing and our health and well being, will be make a significant mark in the history of Man-Kind. Dentsu Aegis Network will be at the forefront of this transformational change, not only by preserving our world by changing the way we work, but also by driving real change and a sustainability mind-set in the market through innovating the way brands are built.
