Why Advertising Needs to be Sustainable Consumption’s Biggest Champion
By Lars Holm, Senior Manager CSR, Dentsu Aegis Network
Let’s be honest: in the world of sustainable development, the word “consumption” does not have very positive connotations. As the United Nations writes in its briefing on Sustainable Development Goal 12 Responsible marketing and consumption: “If we don’t act to change our consumption and production patterns, we will cause irreversible damage to our environment”. But in our world of advertising and media, consumption (of media, of our clients’ products and services) is universally seen as a good thing. It’s what we’re here to do, right?
Many people implicitly agree with the statement that advertising automatically causes (over)consumption. And whilst I could write a long post about the key problems with this belief, let’s get straight to the point here: our industry is late to the party in realising and addressing issues around consumption patterns. To date it has basically been more = better, not less = more. It’s almost as if everyone seems to think there’s an innate conflict in the idea that advertising, designed to drive consumption, can and should actively encourage people to consume more responsibly.
In this post I want to explore the gap between intention and action when it comes to campaigns that foster more sustainable consumption, and who we, as the industry, think is responsible for taking this challenge on. Because I believe there is huge untapped potential for clients and agencies to use this agenda to close the perceived gap between purpose and profit, and use it successfully in marketing strategies.
Growth and sustainable consumption: mutually exclusive?
In my own agency, Dentsu Aegis Network, I ran an internal opinion survey to discover our client people’s attitudes to sustainable consumption. What we saw was that only very few see this as a client priority — 84% of our client people said they wanted to create campaigns that deliver more sustainable consumption patterns, yet only 19% talk to clients about it.
One barrier that our people identified in preventing them from developing campaigns that deliver more sustainable consumption patterns is the pressure to deliver fast and the focus of their KPIs on sales growth and cost control. Such are the expectations of clients and the embedded notions in our own metrics that it doesn’t come as a surprise that it is difficult to develop and suggest campaigns that fall outside this framework.
However, I think there is something else that holds us back from tackling the issue of consumption: our people see sustainable consumption and growth as mutually exclusive.
To give an anecdotal example: A group of agency volunteers recently worked with a social entrepreneur, who changes the food industry by reducing climate impact at a large scale. The social entrepreneur is for profit, and that made some of agency volunteers drop out of the project, because it did not feel altruistic. It provides some insights into how we feel as marketers: perhaps in our eyes, sustainable consumption and growth is a zero sum game.
Instead of addressing the elephant in the room — encouraging (over)consumption — we turn our heads to other forms of societal good, a large trend in Cannes this year. We are all jumping on the bandwagon of doing societal good, latching on a worthy cause, and avoiding any interference with growth objectives. Because when we start matching growth with sustainable consumption, we immediately find a discrepancy between the two. Growth or sustainability. Not both.
With clients and their briefs enforcing a strict separation between social objectives and growth targets, I am not surprised about the findings from a Cannes award jury member that many brands attach themselves to social issues without any apparent business outcomes. Maybe that is entirely intentional, but this means we will get nowhere on addressing our most pressing issue: the environmental and social impacts of increasing consumption.
Whose job is it anyway?
According to our research, clients are seen as having the main responsibility for demanding campaigns around sustainable consumption patterns. Without our own organisation, people also look to senior management to lead the way. Around half our people think it’s primarily their own responsibility to drive these conversations around consumption. So does this imply that we ask others to take the lead, or that we are not willing and able to drive the conversation ourselves?
Is there really a way to balance profit and sustainable consumption patterns?
The short answer is “yes, definitely”. Clients are diversifying and investing in more sustainable products and services. Ethical investment funds are now outperforming traditional ones. Car manufacturers are investing in mobility start-ups, as the world moves towards more sharing economy. An example is General Motor’s investment in Maven, which will completely transform urban areas. Energy providers are also investing in new business models, advising clients on energy savings.
Creating sustainable consumption depends on much more than marketing. Without inherently greener products through supply chain and production alterations, we will be unable to really move the dial. Maybe I am being too optimistic on the influence we can have as marketers — we might not be able to change how clients produce and prioritise. However, we can’t just wait for everyone else to take action on addressing the biggest risk we face. Let’s have the difficult conversation within our own organisations and with our clients in order to become sustainable consumption’s biggest champion.
This article first appeared on Lars Holm’s personal blog.
