Sustainability isn't fluffy: how agencies can prepare now

With sustainability often suffering from vague claims and hazy definitions, three expert practitioners give their advice on how to tackle some of the biggest issues emerging.

Why it matters

With a highly publicised and increasingly controversial agency review under way for the vast Shell account, a fraught tension between agencies’ sustainability commitments (including the interests of staff) and commercial interests has emerged.

What’s more, the risk of agencies taking on fossil fuel business is also growing. Around the world, there’s legislation to address misleading green claims, such as the EU’s proposed Green Claims Directive. But other rules place limits and obligations on a broad swath of economic activity – France’s recent climate laws is just one indicative example.

Discussions of risk might, however, belie the opportunity at hand. While it’s likely that many brands will install sustainability expertise in-house, the implications for agencies could lead to more work in the measurement and reporting of climate activity, an idea that Oxford marketing professor Felipe Tomaz spoke about in Cannes recently as work on ‘facilitated emissions’.

What to do

The questions facing agencies are broad and complex, but during a panel at the IPA’s business growth conference last week, three experts presented some of the practical steps that agencies can take.

Scenario planning
Climate scenario planning ultimately involves asking a series of ‘what if questions’, says Dentsu’s chief sustainability officer for international markets, Anna Lungley, and will fit into company risk reporting structures.

Climate-specific questions run from the broad to the particular: “What if your biggest client no longer has a viable business model? What if your clients demand something different from their advertising agency? What if you can’t attract talent because this is a controversial sector?”

This can lead to even deeper possibilities at all levels of the value chain, and ever more interesting questions: “What if individual consumer choices become constrained by individual carbon quotas?” How would an agency advise a client’s portfolio mix?

External expertise at the core of business strategy

You need expertise from outside the advertising industry, in senior sustainability positions to inform core business strategy, explains Tom Firth, founding partner at M&C Saatchi LIFE, the network’s global sustainability consultancy.

“What is unacceptable – and happens far too often – is that you develop your business strategy and then you go ‘our sustainability is over there. It can’t mess with the business strategy’, and that is unacceptable. It exposes you to enormous risk.”

Long-term thinking

Serious decisions need to revolve around the long term “not short term”, says Jake Dubbins, managing director at Media Bounty and the co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, “because you will have stranded assets and stranded clients that will not exist anymore.”

This principle also extends to measuring beyond what is immediately in front of you, which for agencies is the carbon emissions related to media, but the bigger questions surround risky clients, fossil fuel firms or other major polluters.

“It's about asking questions: ask questions of your leaders, ask questions of each other, ask questions of your plan,” Dubbins concludes.

Story by SPT