In late 2021, Volkswagen celebrated its Employee Of The Month by awarding him a blue branded ribbon and his very own Instagram feature. The honoree, Woolter Smith, didn’t look much like your typical candidate—he was soft and wooly, his ears protruded from his head at 90-degree angles and he had yet to set up a 401k. But Smith is one of Volkswagen’s most industrious sheep, spending his days maintaining the grass at the brand’s solar panel fields in Chattanooga, Tenn.
According to Mary Bakarich, group strategy director at agency Johannes Leonardo, sustainability is a business imperative that can sometimes be molded into a marketing opportunity.
“People want to feel good about the things they buy and agencies are great at simplicity and entertainment,” said Bakarich, adding that any consumer would rather engage with a fun social media activation than sift through a 300-page sustainability report.
Following the 2015 Dieselgate scandal, Volkswagen pivoted to a global battery-electric vehicle lineup, adopted emissions goals consistent with the Paris Climate Agreement and commissioned Johannes Leonardo to help in its rebranding as a sustainability-driven brand. Packaging complex environmental initiatives into user-friendly content is one service that clients expect from agencies, but the responsibilities of creative and media shops in the sustainability space certainly don’t stop there.
As more brands weave planet-first initiatives into every corner of business, they also expect that their partners provide expertise in product development, turn their lofty sustainability goals into actionable steps and share the carbon impact of their entire supply chain, creative campaigns and media buys. When it comes to sustainability, agencies have a few groups of stakeholders that they need to please—their clients, their employees and the consumers of the brands they represent. And the qualifications for what makes an environmentally-ethical business are only becoming more rigorous.
Moving up the production line
Alison Pepper, 4A’s EVP of government relations, sees a common thread between sustainable business in 2022 and the data privacy conversation, which began creeping up in the early 2000s. Just as it is now an expectation for large companies to have a chief privacy officer and a privacy compliance council, agencies need to be thinking about the sustainability expertise that would benefit their team.
This deeper knowledge qualifies agencies to become more embedded in product development, which Pepper cited as an increasingly popular request from clients. According to Emilie Hitch, svp of brand strategy at full-service agency Broadhead, a recent client survey found that the previous demand for “more creative” and “big ideas” is shifting toward the ask for more thorough research and development.
“It’s about getting your agency involved far sooner in the product funnel to make sure that input is taken into account at the beginning of product development,” she said, adding that thinking about sustainability is “probably a lot easier to deal with on the front end” than when the product comes off the assembly line.
Finding the right people for the job
While some agencies are strictly focused on crafting the right messaging as they trace their environmental impact, others have built a reputation of assuming more of a sustainability consulting role at the initial stages of a project. Sam Hornsby, founder and CEO of agency Triptk, knows that offering this expertise to clients means broadening and deepening his company’s network.
“We are regularly tapping field experts, engaging with them and bringing them into our process,” he said. “We by no means are specialists in carbon offsetting in agriculture, but we can find someone who’s done work in that space.”
Agencies are outsourcing expertise while forming partnerships that help them clients reach their sustainability goals. Johannes Leonardo became a partner of Green The Bid, a grassroots initiative that has partnered with more than 20 agencies to make their commercial production practice more sustainable, and Momentum Worldwide just partnered with environmental consultation company Isla to roll out Trace, its real-time carbon impact tool. In 2021, McCann Worldgroup launched a sustainability department staffed with people who have master’s degrees in sustainability and a “deep knowledge of the space,” according to Nannette Lafond-Dufour, president of global clients and business leadership.
“It’s not just a business imperative, but a human one,” she said. “The decisions we make now are going to impact our world for the next 30 years.”
Promising accountability through transparency
Of the world’s largest 100 companies, 90% have made some sort of sustainability or climate commitment in the past two years—according to McCann Worldgroup—and 4A’s reports that every major agency holding company has made some sort of carbon neutrality pledge. Those who don’t stand by their word will be quickly added to the growing list of industry greenwashers.
A lack of transparency can lead to unintentional greenwashing, according to Lafond-Dufour—and agencies can easily avoid making misleading claims by disclosing clear details to their stakeholders, clients and consumers. At McCann, promoting accountability means measuring its executives against a set of KPIs, while making sure all employees understand why sustainability needs to be embedded into every business imperative—from buying media to traveling for meetings. The agency’s performance indicators for leadership include establishing greenwashing guidelines, training and instituting an employee carbon offset program.
Broadhead, which holds many clients in the agriculture space, has committed to zeroing in on the impact of their supply chains—instead of just thinking about the journey from farm to table, Hitch and her team start by looking at the footprint of factors, like seeds and fertilizers.
“My clients are really asking to see all the points along the chain that their good or service is involved in,” said Hitch. “What trucks has it traveled in? Is the plant that it was packaged in using solar energy? Is the company that supplied the packaging using solar energy to make the packaging?”
Companies can’t manage what they don’t measure—and the demand for transparency also brings an opportunity for companies from Google to Group M, which is developing its own carbon calculator, to roll out proprietary tools. But according to Group M’s global head of partnerships Kieley Taylor, questions arise when agencies start “grading their own homework.”
“We want to have validation from a trusted third party in the methodology that we’re using,” she said.
At Triptk, Hornsby is in the business of helping clients turn “big, lofty commitments” into concrete actions.
“A lot of big companies have been setting ambitious targets, but actually taking those targets and breaking them down into actionable roadmaps for their brands requires a lot of work,” he said, adding that creating the proper plan means looking at the entire product or service ecosystem, from agriculture to packaging and production.
Starting the conversation with consumers
According to McCann, 82% of people say climate change is the biggest challenge facing the world in the next 20 years. While consumers claim sustainability is top of mind, their actions don’t always match their words, stressed Hornsby. To address this discrepancy, he noted that agencies must prioritize research that pinpoints where exactly consumers are willing to make environmentally-friendly adjustment. That data will then inform brands on the best ways to convince their audiences to join the sustainability movement.
One of Triptk’s clients is rolling out 100% carbon neutral distilleries—and it’s the agency’s job to facilitate excitement around the initiative among local community members, visitors and employees.
“We’re seeing a need for solutions that really inspire people and aren’t cookie cutter,” he said, emphasizing that the future of sustainability encompasses bottom-up solutions that make consumers feel more engaged and less powerless. “How do we make the people who work at the distillery motivated around what they’re doing? How do you involve local communities, schools, make it an educational experience for the next generation?”
The advertising industry isn’t always the most keen on sharing tools and ideas out of fear of imitation, but the future of sustainability requires a certain spirit that is unselfish and synergetic.
“We work in an industry that has been historically competitive,” said Lafond-Dufour. “You don’t want to give your secrets away and you don’t want to talk about how you’re working with a client. That is not at all the case in this area.”
