The Big Idea is a distillation of conversations held during our Cannes Expert Interview Series.
In the face of growing environmental concerns, the advertising industry is uniting to reduce its carbon footprint. Insights from our conversation with John Osborn, Director of Ad Net Zero in the United States, highlight the power of collaboration, the introduction of standard frameworks, and the synergy between sustainability and business growth. These elements are pivotal for driving meaningful change and fostering a greener future in advertising.
Collaboration is Essential to Drive Sustainability
The challenge of reducing carbon emissions in advertising requires a collective effort from all industry stakeholders. Uncommon collaboration across competitive lines is necessary to navigate the complexities of the ecosystem and make significant progress.
“Our partner in this endeavor uses a great term: ‘uncommon collaboration’. Because you don’t usually see this in this crazy, competitive industry, but a lot of folks – from agencies, brands, specialty companies like ad tech firms, consultants, and even individuals from the science community, trade associations like the IAB and the ANA and the AAAAs – have all come together! And if you think it’s easy, think again!”
Sustainability and Business Growth Go Hand in Hand
Embracing sustainability does not mean sacrificing business growth. In fact, integrating sustainable practices can unlock new opportunities and serve as a market differentiator, aligning profit with purpose.
“Yes, you can grow business and you can be responsible from a sustainability perspective now more than ever before. So, like, what’s keeping you? Let’s go!”
By fostering industry-wide collaboration, establishing clear measurement standards, and aligning sustainability with business objectives, the advertising industry can make significant strides in reducing its carbon footprint.
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Transcript
Cannes Interview Series
[This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]
Terry Taouss (Acceptable Ads Committee): I’m here with John Osborn, director of Ad Net Zero in the United States. I’m a big fan of the work that AdNetZero does, which is to reduce carbon emissions across the advertising industry. They work with some of the world’s largest brands and leading industry groups like the AAAAs, IAB, and a host of others. I’m excited to speak to John today about the exciting news that they announced as well as some other stuff.
So welcome John.
John Osborn (AdNetZero): Thanks Terry.
Terry: John, I’m going to start off by asking you: before Ad Net Zero, you had a very storied career – amongst other things, you were the CEO of OMD in the US, president and CEO of BBDO in New York – which is to say that you could have chosen pretty much anything you wanted to do in the next stage of your career. Why Ad Net Zero?
John: Honestly, Terry, it found me. I’ve been really humbled and lucky, frankly, to have been in an environment within Omnicom to work with the people I work with, the clients I was blessed to work with from BBDO and then ultimately on into OMD.
Coming out of the pandemic, I was looking for potentially another experience. I got a call from Ad Net Zero and I hadn’t been familiar with it. They explained what the idea was and I guess I was uniquely a good fit for them because I’ve done a fairly long period of time in creative and production. So I understand it from that angle. I jumped into media. I’ve got some acumen in media, and I understand some of the levers that we need to harness in terms of driving carbon emission there.
And then I’ve done a lot of non profit work. So I’m built to serve in that respect and bring folks together. That’s the way I am as a person anyway. I just sort of fell into it and it’s a really, really good fit and I’m really enjoying it. I’m trying to make a difference – but this is a we thing, not a me thing. This is about the collective and that’s the principle behind Ad Net Zero.
Terry: This week in Cannes, AdNet Zero announced an industry-wide standard on digital media emissions measurement called the Global Media Sustainability Framework. Can you explain what that is and how that came to be?
John: That is a great question. So first and foremost, it is a framework. But it’s a beginning. We need more support in order for this thing to start to roll. But the good news is we now have some meat on the bone.
In the world of media, it’s a big eye opener in terms of how much carbon emissions are associated with the distribution, the planning, the data, as well as the activation all the way through the ecosystem. When it comes to media, the framework that you mentioned is not just a digital media framework; it is a collective media framework.
So where we are now in the ecosystem, we’ve got the framework, we’ve got the first three formulas now: we’ve got broadcast, out-of-home, and we have digital. Companies can start to now grab hold of them and ingest them into their own business practices. So if you’re a brand and you’re working with a company that calculates carbon emissions, you probably want to make sure that that company is rooting their methodology in the standards. If you have an agency that is planning and buying your media and your brand, you may want to ask that agency “how do you do the work you do? Is it rooted in the best practices?
At Ad Net Zero, it’s not about us. We’re a collective. We’re bringing folks together. But the fact is, we need the technical expertise. So like, why would we try and reinvent the wheel? That would run counter to our own sustainability practices. You don’t usually see this in this crazy, competitive industry, but a lot of folks from agencies, brands, specialty companies like ad tech firms, consultants and even individuals from the science community, trade associations like the IAB and the ANA and the AAAAs, have all come together! And if you think it’s easy, think again.
Terry: Ad Net Zero’s supporters include the world’s biggest brands, and the leading platforms and tech companies, but you also have support from the world’s six big holding company agencies. Given how much of an impact that media planning and buying has on total emissions, how important has that been to the goal and to Ad Net Zero’s mission going forward?
John: That’s a great question. Their support – it’s hard to even put into words. We wouldn’t be in this conversation where we are, which is still in the early days, if it weren’t for the support from some of the big holding companies. Look, the trick on this thing, and it isn’t a trick, is to make sure that we have an unfair share of the media marketplace. And in order to do that, we’ve had to engage them. We engage them because they’re the knowledge experts. They understand what the barriers and the obstacles are, as well as what the upside is, because for them, there needs to be a natural intersection point between profit and purpose. At the end of the day, the people who are making the decisions are still primarily making those decisions based on: is this going to grow my business now? If I said to you, this can grow my business and be more sustainable. Well, that’s an unlock. That’s what the environment allows us now to do. So for those decision makers from those big agencies on the front lines, if they’re aware of and on the front foot that’s going to move the marketplace.
We need this consistent set of standards. If we come along as Ad Net Zero and we’re going to drive this top down – it’s impossible. There’s no way. The only way we can do this is to get an unfair share of folks leaning in the right way. There are going to be some detractors and a whole bunch of folks in the middle saying “I don’t know. I mean, is this the real thing? Is this going to happen?” We need them to come with us. That’s why the holding companies and all that media buying power is critical to this from a momentum standpoint. But forget about momentum for a second. Just making sure we don’t miss something, making sure we’re kicking the tires and doing the best we can do. They’re the knowledge experts, along with a lot of other companies. We want to listen to them because it makes us smarter and better.
Is it perfect? No. This is the beginning of the real work now. And the real work now is taking these standards and applying them into your business practices. If you’re an agency, do that! If you’re a client, do that! If you’re a measurement company, do that! If you’re an ad tech company, do that! If you’re a consultancy, do that! If you’re a nonprofit like an Ad Net Zero, we got to do that! Everyone’s got to start to do that. Is it gonna happen overnight? No. But I think we’re on the right track here. And that in this space is a big, big, big moment. And that’s a good thing.
Terry: At the Acceptable Ads Committee, we often talk about balance. Balancing the needs of users – in terms of their experience when they’re browsing the web – with the needs of other stakeholders, publishers, advertisers, everyone else. Sustainability in digital media, or media generally, has seemed like a daunting problem where many of the stakeholders seem to be paralyzed because there wasn’t a way forward. One of the great things that I think Ad Net Zero has done is really give them an action plan, give them a mechanism to start moving in the direction of sustainability. How do you continue to grow the industry’s appetite for sustainability, while balancing it against the economic realities of brands reaching consumers and agencies fulfilling their promises to those brands?
John: The reality of the ecosystem is: it is a complex ecosystem. We’ve tried very hard to, within the digital media space, to listen and learn from all the various players in that complex ecosystem. Looks simple from the outside, but as soon as you open that hood, it’s not so easy to understand. And so we’ve tried to de-complexify it. Some of the unlocks, frankly, have come through the partnership that we are humbled to have with some of our supporters. One of them is the ANA. Thank you. They had an unlock because they were working on a transparency study and they were looking at cleaning up the internet through the lens of MFAs as well as other unproductive uses of impressions. They’ve tried to clean it up and they’ve found through their transparency study that there’s two ways to clean up the internet. You reduce waste and fraud. By the way, at the same time, you can also achieve less carbon emissions. It’s not an either or anymore. It’s an “and” thing, and that helps us understand how to create that balance in the work that we do. The other thing is, it’s really important that we understand that it can’t just be sustainable at the expense of something else. It can’t cost a ton more. Optimally, it will help unlock even more growth potential. Part of our job at Ad Net Zero is to educate. We just announced a partnership with Kantar, and they just came back with a whole bunch more information that said the right kind of claim around environmental or sustainability messages is an economic multiplier. Same is true in terms of how the work is created. When consumers hear that this company did X, Y and Z for lower carbon emissions, they did it more sustainably, that’s also a differentiator. So there’s more research, more education that’s come to bear, as well as through the experience of working with all the supporters that we’ve got, we understand and we respect the need for and the importance of that balance.
Terry: John, sustainability is obviously a global problem. We’ve seen Europe and parts of Asia perhaps lead in terms of regulation, but many of the biggest advertisers in the world are located in the U. S. How does Ad Net Zero approach differ in various parts of the world and, in terms of your leadership in the U.S., how are you helping to bridge that gap, in terms of responsiveness?
John: Things are not cookie cutter in terms of where sustainability is around the world. Let’s be clear about that. However, for a global framework to be a global framework, it needs to be a global framework. So we do have a consistent framework around the world. But we understand that within that framework, there has to be some flexibility to adapt for local market variations.
One thing we try and do is, regardless of who we’re talking to, it might be a skeptic in the United States, it could be someone else who’s more of a leading edge kind of environmentalist, is to make sure that everything we do is rooted in that science. So we’ve got a director of science and policy that is now part of the fabric of Ad Net Zero. The other thing we try and do, to your point about some of the big brands that kind of are homed in the United States, we work hand in glove with the ANA. They’re the body that is representing a lot of those big brands that have home base in the United States. Similarly, the IAB – really, really important connective jumper cable into the world of ad tech and technology and digital media. The agencies are represented by the AAAA’s. So we’ve got a very strong line in a partnership with the AAAA’s around key initiatives.It’s not us, it’s we. The power of “we”. Bringing that together helps us adapt for those local market variations because there are some.
Terry: JAdNet Zero has many of the world’s largest brands, agencies, tech companies and industry groups already on board as supporters. But there are still some laggards and there are still some people that might be sitting on the fence. What is your message to those companies that might be thinking about sustainability but haven’t fully committed to the initiative?
John: My message is simple: It’s go time. Let’s go. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s partner together. There’s no real reason why a company shouldn’t be a part of this movement. The main criteria is that companies need to have a publicly disclosed science based target. And that’s a good thing, right? The companies that are part of Ad Net Zero were nowhere near last year. I mean, we basically had 30 companies supporting us; now we’ve got well over 100. We had no meat on the bone when it came to some of the standards in media; now we’ve got a framework and three formulas. In production, we had only a few case studies in the carbon calculation when it comes to making the work that we make in production. Now we’ve got our most recent annual report for Ad Green – well over 2000 jobs. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Now we’ve got real measurement happening. So it is go time. Go, go, go. And I think the ones that are on the early side of this will have an advantage in the long run because this ain’t going away. And yes, you can grow business and you can be responsible from a sustainability perspective now more than ever before. So, like, what’s keeping you? Let’s go.
Terry: John, thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure speaking to you. Love the work that AdNetZero is doing and looking forward to continuing to make progress as an industry.
John: Thank you, Terry.