A game show style presentation on the carbon footprint of advertising was one of the more entertaining sessions of this year’s MFA Ex, but had a serious message the industry needs to grapple with. Here is B&T’s summary of the Sydney conference.
Hearts & Science delivered a sobering wake up call to the advertising industry – digital advertising is causing huge amounts of CO2 emissions each year and it needs to be addressed with careful media planning.
At last week’s MFA Ex event in Sydney, Hearts & Science managing director Liz Wigmore and chief data and innovation officer Ashley Wong hosted a ‘price is right’ style game show to illustrate just how much carbon digital advertising emits.
Michael from Mindshare and Sarah from Rufus had to answer a series of questions about how sustainable advertising is.
Michael missed the mark on each of his questions, while Sarah (pictured below) went on a hot streak, answering all of them correctly.
A thousand impressions of digital advertising emits 609 grams of carbon, which is well above the average daily commute, a load of warm water washing and a week’s worth of coffee.
“We actually looked at the Hearts & Science agency and looked at just one team. The stats revealed that on an average day, we’re serving about 6 million ad impressions form just one team,” Wigmore said.
“If you calculate the carbon emission, that’s 3.6 tonnes just for that one team in one day. To put some context to that, that’s the equivalent of one household’s average energy consumption for a year.”
The activity of a team serving digital ads across a year is the equivalent of the carbon emissions of four year’s worth of Australian bushfires.
Advertising on made for advertising (MFA) websites only exacerbates the problem, emitting 26.4 per cent more carbon than advertising on normal websites.
Ensuring media plans avoid MFA websites is one tactic media planners can use to help reduce the carbon footprint of media plans.
“The ideal solution is to integrate a prevention measure, which actually can go into your buys, where it can dynamically identify these sites and prevent them from being used in your ad campaigns. If you’re not quite ready for that step, the advice and the ask today is just to really stay on top of site lists,” Wigmore said, adding that Scope3 can help buyers and brands identify websites to avoid.
Removing MFA sites from isn’t just better for the planet, it’s better for business by reducing the average CPM and increasing the click through rate.
“The key thing that we wanted to just really frame today is that having a sustainability led approach to your media does not come at the cost of performance. In fact, it’s actually better,” Wigmore said.
The final question pointed out that using ChatGPT emits 10 times the carbon of a Google search.
“Our ask today is if something can be serviced by a quick Google search, let’s keep using Google. [You need to make sure] the AI carbon intensity is really thought about before you just jump in and use that engine,” Wigmore said.
Blocking two million impressions each year saves more C02 emissions than becoming vegetarian, cutting quarterly flights to Melbourne and even optimising social media campaigns.
Other highlights from MFA Ex
The future of AI
Before they rushed off to grab coffees during the morning break, MFA attendees heard PHD’s David Bielenberg, head of strategy, and Gemma Dawkins, national head of digital, talk about the role of AI in our industry’s future.
The duo exited a time machine covered by eerie smoke, arriving from the year 2049. Before they returned, audience members responded to questions that would determine the future they went back to.
The questions included the “automisation of work”, personalisation, and the regulation of AI.
Bielenberg and Dawkins jumped back in the time machine, and gave the audience a glimpse of the future.
While AI had a multitude of benefits in the industry’s future, including making manual tasks less costly and more effective, there is a risk of losing touch with clients and the work becoming “more boring”.
Using data to unlock Aldi & New Balance campaigns
Sarah Heitkamp, national head of strategy & planning, Zenith Media, and Linda Fagerlund, chief strategy officer, Mediahub (both pictured above), shared learnings from their work on impressive Aldi and New Balance campaigns.
Heitkamp and her team built a data set from scratch to gain more insight into ALDI’s shoppers, allowing the brand to break through to customers during Christmas.
“We didn’t actually know anything about ALDI shoppers,” she said. “It was a difficult task, as Christmas was already a crowded space for supermarkets,” she added.
Personalisation and insight into customers helped them achieve their goal, seeing budget-focused Aussies “Go Big on the Little Things”.
Fagerlund worked on New Balance’s “Run Your Way” campaign after the sneaker brand rode a wave of sudden street wear popularity but has struggled to crack the runner’s market.
“New Balances used to be dad shoes. Suddenly, they were cool and every trendsetter was wearing them,” she said.
“You might be asking, what was the problem? We were missing out on the athlete side – how could we break into a world dominated by Nike and Adidas?”
The solution was to take a different approach, focusing not on elite athletes, but on the everyday runner. Strava data was compiled to target popular running routes for the campaign’s OOH activity.
Futurama and future skills
Another session explored the future skills the industry will need as advances in AI technology evolves the role of media agency staff.
This is Flow’s CSO Catherine Rushton, Initiative’s associate strategy director Kate O’Loughlin, GroupM’s chief people officer Scott Laird and LinkedIn’s senior content solutions consultant Robin O’Connell said that each of the main three characters of the comedy Futurama – Bender, Fry and Leela, who successfully live in the future, have traits that media agency professionals will need to not only survive, but thrive.
“If you look at the data today, the skills required (due to AI) are going to change by 66 per cent by 2023,” O’Connell said.
“More than half of the skills that we are using today, potentially less relevant, more than half of the skills that we need to do our jobs in the future we may not even know today.
“Of all the roles in Australia, about 55 per cent are going to be impacted by AI and jobs will change.”
This will require professionals to have “adaptable intelligence” to take advantage of evolving job opportunities.
This is where you need to bend it like bender,” Rushton said. “Our opportunity using adaptable intelligence is to shift the focus upstream to those big, macro business solutions that clients really value, but will also stretch you in your career.”
The most important and in demand skill that will be required is communication, followed by customer service and leadership.
OMD’s Brittany Meale and James Graffe addressed why client CEOs “are not that into you”, a point touched upon by Optus consumer marketing lead Cameron Luby, while EssenceMediacom’s Marine Turner declared that friendship bracelets re the breakout media channel of 2024. The day ended with a motivational talk by health and performance expert Olly Bridge (pictured above), who shared advice on the importance of looking after energy levels, health and wellbeing to drive a high level of performance.
Reporting by Arvind Hickman and Fredrika Stigell
