How the media industry can prepare for a decarbonised future

There are various decarbonisation frameworks designed for heavy industries, but what about the less obvious emitters like the service sector? How can they standardise emissions measurement and set out on the road to decarbonisation?

In this episode of Sustainability Matters, we look specifically at the advertising and media sector and the challenges companies have faced in decarbonising their supply chains. Host Bruno Sarda and EY CCaSS Senior Manager Charlotte Pugh are joined by Ollie Joyce and Alexandra McGee from marketing services leader WPP, which is at the forefront of efforts to establish an industry-wide carbon measurement framework.

Ollie and Alexandra explain how developing a standardised approach to measuring carbon emissions is a complex but necessary step for the media industry to achieve ambitious net-zero targets. They discuss how WPP’s proposed global framework for measuring the ad-based carbon emissions and their media decarbonisation coalition seek to create alignment with industry players.

Ollie and Alexandra discuss how media placement generates a significant carbon footprint and clients are questioning the emissions of the platforms they appear on. While emissions will never be the sole factor in media placement decision-making, the guests think that media investment will shift to publishers and platforms that decarbonise fastest. This has business advantages, as greater transparency may improve the media environment and deliver lower emissions.

Finally, Ollie and Alexandra talk about the lessons other industries that lack a standardised approach to decarbonisation can learn from the media industry’s experience, and how real change can be achieved from incremental gains.

Key takeaways:

• There is a new resolve within the advertising industry to reduce its carbon footprint.
• Existing GHG protocols can be difficult to interpret for the service sector and this complexity in measurement creates a roadblock for action.
• Industry-wide collaboration is key to establishing standardised emissions measurement in complex service sector value chains, such as the media sector.
• Emissions data is becoming an increasingly important factor in media placement decisions.
• Making carbon a factor in media decisions may reduce waste in the media supply chain and improve the media environment.
• Decarbonisation efforts can correlate to business and workforce benefits. 

You can also listen to this podcast on Apple and Spotify.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available. Read the transcript.