AdGreen, which was launched in 2014 as a sustainable production project, became part of the U.K.’s Advertising Association in 2020. Through that collaboration, the group created its carbon calculator, which is funded from a 0.25% levy that participating agencies add to advertising production costs and pass onto AdGreen.
“Having this industry dataset—however early in its stage it is—it’s still useful to be able to draw some parallels from,” Fenn said.
The average emissions per project increased from March to November, Fenn said, but that’s largely due to the size of the projects measured.
Next year, Fenn hopes to find a major brand or agency willing to partner with AdGreen on a case study to demonstrate how carbon budgeting on ad production shapes its decision-making.
“It’d be such an amazing example of leadership for a big agency or big brand come out and say, ‘We’ve measured. [We don’t have an] exact picture of what we’re at, but we know enough to be able to say we’re going to set a carbon budget of x,’” Fenn explained.
Long overdue
Still, some sustainability experts argue that measuring and reducing emissions generated by ad production is merely overdue housekeeping. While important to understand, the carbon cost of ad production pales in comparison to the impact that advertising has in driving the consumption of climate-harming products.
“This is absolutely fixing something which is very overdue to be fixed,” Solitaire Townsend, co-founder and chief solutionist at sustainability-focused agency Futerra, told Adweek. “It must never become a distraction from the actual material impact of your work, which is the emissions from your influence.”
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