Aimee Buchanan, CEO of GroupM Australia and New Zealand, has said that some of the company’s clients are “incredibly nervous” when it comes to talking about the steps they’re taking to improve their environmental impact.
Lead image L-R: Lisa Day, director of content partnerships, Nine; Kate Waugh, national head of creative solutions, Nine; Patrick Gibbons, partner and co-founder Orizontas; Aimee Buchanan, CEO GroupM; Josh Faulks, CEO AANA; Hayley Peacock-Gower, CMO Aurora Expeditions.
“I think that’s a real shame because some of the businesses we work with are doing incredible work,” she told a room of industry insiders.
“It’s not the end state but they’re working towards the end state. Even when we launched Alpha [GroupM’s decarbonisation strategy], a tiny little microcosm of work, I have never felt so anxious talking about something in the market because it’s an industry where people like to pull you down.”
Buchanan was talking on a panel at Nine’s Big Ideas Store about greenwashing and was joined by AANA’s CEO Josh Faulks, Orizontas’ Patrick Gibbons and Hayley Peacock-Gower, CMO of Aurora Expeditions.
Despite Buchanan’s reservations around spruiking GroupM’s sustainability strategy, she urged her clients and other businesses in the room to at least try and improve their sustainability.
“I knew this was going to be a hot topic. We don’t have all the answers. I’m not sitting here today saying, ‘We’ve got this all resolved.’ But we’re trying things and that’s the message that we sent out. We have to keep pushing and trying and exploring this because no one’s got the answers,” she explained.
“I’d say the same for our clients. It’s about the intent. That might not wash with legal but for how we work with brands, it’s about what their plan is and what their intent is.”
Read more: It’s Not Easy Being Green – Does Advertising Have A Problem With The Environment?
Faulks said that while brands were “timid” when it came to making claims about their environmental work, those fears were grounded in reality.
“You can understand why brands are timid. If you think about the range of different things that can happen from reputational damage to pulling a campaign that cost millions of dollars to fines to full civil action by ASIC or the ACCC,” he said.
“There’s a lot to make them timid.”
One area of particular concern for GroupM was the sprawling programmatic supply chain and the sheer scale of the resulting emissions from data centres. When Buchanan swapped the CEO role at OMD for GroupM, she explained that she made a worrying discovery.
“GroupM contributes 55 per cent of the emissions of WPP [the agency’s holding group]. That’s not because we’re leaving our lights or not turning our laptops off at night. It’s because of the supply chain and the advertising that we book on behalf of our clients,” she said.
“Over the last six months, we’ve measured 900 million impressions. Through those impressions, we have emitted 636 metric tonnes of carbon which is about equivalent to flying to LA return for 1,000 people.”
Buchanan said that GroupM has already started putting some of its learnings into action. Working with one of WPP’s creative agencies, the pair unpacked and rethought the creative for an entire campaign to reduce the file size of digital ads and reduce the power necessary to place them.
“We were able to reduce that campaign, with a million impressions, by 41 per cent through working with the creative agency on the assets. Nothing changed,” said Buchanan.
However, despite the best efforts of those within GroupM and the wider world of WPP, Gibbons explained that businesses and brands can only take action up to a certain point. The real roadblock to reducing emissions in advertising – particularly in Australia – is the power grid that everything runs on.
“It’s really about electricity and where we get our electricity from. To put it into context, electricity is responsible for about 30 per cent of our emissions. So what about the other two-thirds of our emissions? This is where a lot of companies are, it’s difficult to deal with.” he said.
According to the most recent figures, 71 per cent of energy generated in Australia came from fossil fuels. This presents a major challenge for any brand looking to clean up its act. What’s more, the debate around what constitutes emission reduction is constantly evolving – while carbon offsets had been considered a legitimate tactic a few years back, Gibbons said that the pendulum has shifted.
This could potentially pose problems for Buchanan’s GroupM which she explained had invested in carbon offsetting and other firms including Veridooh, Man of Many and JCDecaux, to name a few.
“There’s a question around the integrity of them,” said Gibbons.
“There has been quite a lot of discussion and debate and the government-initiated review led by the former chief scientist looked at this recently. It’s going to be an ongoing challenge. In Europe, the views on offsets swing quite wildly depending on the political argument of the day. When we’re talking about greenwashing, we’re talking about sustainability. A lot of this is going to be determined in part by political arguments that are occurring in Europe and the United States.”
These concerns and claims will come to a head in 2030 – the year that a range of companies said they would achieve a variety of carbon reduction targets.
“They’re going to be struggling to meet them. What do they do when that becomes public? These are going to be ASX-listed companies. Regulators are going to come after you and even worse, you’re going to find yourself in the middle of lawsuits brought by aggrieved shareholders,” said Gibbons.
No matter how you cut it, it seems likely that being stuck in a lawsuit about greenwashing will look worse for a brand than doing nothing. Whether that will change before the end of the decade remains to be seen.
