Connecting the Chief Sustainability Officer with the Chief Marketing Officer
Sustainability goals are increasingly being aligned with commercial goals of businesses, large and small. This extract from the new book, Sustainable Advertising, by the Advertising Association's communications director Matt Bourn and Ad Net Zero chair Sebastian Munden, considers the importance of the marketing function working hand-in-hand with their sustainability colleagues.
As sustainability efforts of companies continue to grow, many chief sustainability officers are turning their attention beyond their immediate issues to look at their footprint in marketing and advertising. It can only be beneficial to connect efforts in our industry with those experts, especially in the definition of emissions when it comes to marketing and advertising. We spoke to Bill Wescott, managing partner at Brain Oxygen LLC about this.
Why do you think it is so important for the chief sustainability officer to connect and collaborate with the chief marketing officer?
The attention of the C-suite on sustainability and particularly climate issues has been so focused on the physical supply chain, that the marketing and advertising activities have been completely overlooked from an operational emissions perspective. The only time that marketing comes to mind typically is with regard to communicating product sustainability attributes, not on the emissions from marketing and advertising operations. In talking with many chief sustainability officers and top climate experts in leading brands, I discovered none of them have thought about these emissions, but all of them committed to reaching out to the CMOs to get the conversation started.
In the absence of this internal support, the marketing function and their value chain partners started to take actions independent of the greenhouse gas accounting systems, standards, and best practices that have been developed over the last two decades. Vendors with proprietary, black box "carbon calculators" selling opaque offsets at many times their market value stepped in to take advantage of the lack of knowledge of buyers who were eager to take some sort of tangible action. In addition to the clear inefficiencies of reinventing the wheel, the real concern is that all the energy and resources spent in these efforts would be rejected in the end by the climate experts in the brands as they would not be able to use the emissions estimates in their official summaries that have to be third-party verified against existing standards. I was surprised at this "Wild West" environment as in my world it is self-evident that serious companies don't make claims or accept claims from others that have not been verified by a reputable third party.
Facilitating CSO-CMO collaborations to accelerate real climate action in the ad sector is now a key focus of mine as it can quickly clear the air of confusion so the parties can focus on meaningful improvements.
How can an improved collaboration between these two areas of a business help the marketing function? With its own operations? And through the way it communicates about the pipeline of more sustainable products and services?
The first major benefit of this collaboration for the marketing function is an increase in the speed and efficiency that comes with alignment with the rest of their company's climate actions. The marketing function can use its leverage to align its value chain with the same climate systems used by the rest of the world. As product offerings become more sustainable via new business models (e.g., circular economy approaches to selling services instead of goods; reducing use of plastics, toxics, limited natural resources), consumers and other stakeholders will be delighted to know that the means of communicating these attributes are also sustainable.
What do you think will be the ultimate benefits of putting sustainability and marketing on the same dashboard for campaign planning, execution, and evaluation?
The marketing function and operations are really just an application of the philosophy of Scope 3 to understand the climate impacts along the entire value chain, quantify and verify them so they can be reported to all stakeholders. This process enables the development of approaches that can then reduce these emissions to the maximum extent possible. These functions deserve to receive the same attention and follow the same standards as every other function on the sustainability dashboard of serious brands.
This extract from Sustainable Advertising by Matt Bourn and Sebastian Munden is copyright 2024 and reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd. All rights reserved. It can be ordered via the Kogan Page website here and you can save 20 percent when ordering from Kogan Page by using the code ANA at the checkout.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Matt Bourn is director of communications for the Advertising Association and Ad Net Zero, based in London, UK. With 25 years' experience, previously he was Managing Director of Braben, working for companies such as Sky, Channel 4, Disney and Sony.
Sebastian Munden is a strategy and communications adviser, based in London, UK. He is also chair of WRAP (The Waste & Resources Action Programme) and chair of Ad Net Zero. He worked at Unilever for 30+ years applying the principles of business as a force for good, lastly as CEO of the U.K. and Ireland business.