AdGreen initiative from UK advertising
September 9, 2020
The Climate Action Working Group, led by UK trade body the Advertising Association in partnership with ISBA and the IPA, has launched AdGreen, an initiative to unite the advertising industry to eliminate the negative environmental impacts of production.
AdGreen is backed at launch by adam&eveDDB, APR (Advertising Production Resources), Havas, MullenLowe Group as part of IPG, Sky, Unilever and WPP, along with the support of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), the Advertising Producers Association (APA), the Association of Photographers (AOP) and Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) who will be coordinating member participation.
It will be led by industry specialist, Jo Coombes with support from strategy advisor Tricia Duffy, and is a strategic partnership with albert, the BAFTA-led sustainability project for the TV and Film Industry. Following the learnings of albert, AdGreen will provide tools, services and expertise to the entire UK advertising production community from 2021, enabling all advertising professionals to improve the way campaign assets are produced for a better climate future.
AdGreen launches with two clear aims: to measure advertising production carbon footprints allowing the project team to understand which activities have the biggest impact, and to empower the industry to reduce emissions and to act for a zero carbon / zero waste. It will offer a carbon footprint calculator incorporating global carbon factors from over 140 countries, as well as specialist training, a renewable energy buy-in scheme, and later, certification and a high-quality offsetting scheme, for the advertising community in the UK.
The Advertising Association is actively seeking more partners to accelerate the uptake and impact of AdGreen. All advertisers, agencies and production companies looking to find out more about AdGreen should register their interest at its website. AdGreen is also exploring ways to establish the standard at an international level and welcomes enquiries from interested parties in territories from around the world.
“We want to build a future-proofed, carbon-literate workforce, giving us the opportunity for the highest creative ambition with the lowest carbon impact,” commented Coombes, Industry Sustainability Lead, AdGreen. “Ultimately, AdGreen means everyone producing advertising work will be able to capture and understand their own footprint data; advertisers and advertising agencies will be able to compare that to anonymised benchmarks.”
“We are determined our industry does everything in its power to respond to the climate emergency,” added Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive, Advertising Association. “AdGreen will make it possible for anyone producing ads to be confident they can do it in a way that does not impact on the climate – a fundamental change that we have to all make now. Our thanks go to all our founding partners for providing the funding to make this happen.”
“Our industry must come together to tackle the urgent climate crisis,” declared Debbie Klein, Group Chief Marketing, Corporate Affairs and People Officer, Sky. “At Sky, we’ve committed to be net zero carbon by 2030, two decades ahead of the UK Government’s targets. But we also want to encourage others to #GoZero, so I’m delighted that Sky is standing alongside others as a founding member of AdGreen. Together we can provide a vital platform to share best practice and innovative ways to tackle the climate crisis, because the world can’t wait.”
“We face the biggest challenge of our lifetime but there are many ways, often small but important changes, that we can all make to tackle this challenge,” stated James Best, Chair of the Climate Action Working Group. “We know that our industry is hugely concerned about the climate emergency and want to do everything in their power to avert it. To that end, this launch is will be the first of a series of actions we will be publishing to help everyone in our industry make behaviour changes that collectively have an important impact.”
The Climate Action workstream is a key part of the Advertising Association Council’s new responsibility agenda in 2020, following the launch of the association’s new mission: to promote the role and rights of responsible advertising and its value to people, society, businesses and the economy.