“Media and Sustainability” might sound like the title of a 1980’s synth pop album but actually it’s increasingly becoming a core business concern for media owners and agencies.  

 

Those resistant to the greening of media argue that they are responsible for strategies to grow clients’ profits not their environmental policies. However, while sustainability people currently have bigger fish to fry – tackling child labour and recyclability for example – media choices are a highly visible expression of an advertiser’s ethos. 

 

The result is that sustainability is becoming a day-to-day concern. One reason is that the many brands that have made public commitments to green issues, such as going carbon neutral, are now subject to much greater internal and external scrutiny. 

 They already book greener cabs, encourage staff to share lifts or indeed travel by bus, use greener electricity and are moving to paperless ticketing.  

 

Pretty soon they will also be looking at the footprint of their media schedule. Since the 1980s, brands such as Aveda, Body Shop and Ecover have been scrutinising marketing materials in the same way as packaging. But in 2007 it’s much more mainstream. 

 

The process started with the social responsibility reports. These are quite bulky to the point where a possibly apocryphal but widespread tale claims that the full HSBC report, if printed, would need two people to lift it. 

 

It was ironic to talk about saving the planet in a format that (even with the best inks and paper stocks) was so resource intensive. So these reports naturally moved to PDF instead. The challenge now is to address communications to consumers. 

 

HSBC is a case in point. Its “Green Kit” initiative in the US was designed to reward those who sign up to its automated (paperless) bill paying option by offering a pack containing a low-energy lightbulb, reusable shopping bags and eco-product vouchers to all those who have paid three or more bills online. 

 

It is cited as an example of the new impetus towards digital and away from paper-based communications in all dealings with customers. Previously, it was about cost and convenience. Now, it is about footprint too. Even here, however, there were challenges. The scheme was immediately criticised for its reliance on the direct mail push that promoted the offer. There’s little doubt that HSBC is deadly serious about its commitment to be ‘the green bank’. What it has now learned is that taking this position means that all of its actions have to be consistent. 

 

In the UK, Sainsbury got flak for the fact that its much-publicised Anya Hindmarch “I’m not a plastic bag” bags were neither organic cotton nor fair trade. That’s a crisis of printing and production. 

 

The print media industry is obviously watching this trend nervously. The case for paper is that electronic media use energy and that such devices often have poor recyclability and short life spans. Nevertheless, there is a debate to be had about the relative merits of print versus digital. 

 

When I was considering the best way to publish The Green Marketing Manifesto earlier this year, the fact that people were likely to print off downloaded copies of the book tipped the scales back in favour of a traditional book format with the right dyes, paper stocks, cover and so on. 

 

Nonetheless, there are worries about issues for paper to address now such as the litter of freesheet newspapers abandoned on public transport every day. In London, Associated Newspapers and News International have come under pressure from the authorities to contribute to the cost of recycling their afternoon freesheets as they battle to dominate this distribution c hannel. 

 

Consumer titles with circulations running into the millions – the very publications that extol the benefits of going green – are having to start to measure their own impact. Time Inc, for example, has taken part in studies of its carbon footprint – its average magazine produces 0.29 pounds of CO2 per copy – and it has joined the US Paper Working Group alongside Starbucks and Bank of America. One of the pressures driving such moves is the fact that clients such as HSBC and Aveda are asking questions.  

 

The first part of the process is that the relative impacts of different media choices (right down to details such as the materials used in a mailshot) are assessed. In this way, if a firm has targets to reduce its impact, progress can be tracked and reported. It’s a similar process to the way procurement manages resources from a cost and performance point of view. 

 

Intriguingly, there is a new scheme  designed to give clients (and agencies) the ability to check the carbon footprint of their media schedule currently on test in the UK. It is called Noughtilus and is being developed by a company that already provides webbased tools to manage marketing costs and performance. 

 

The system, which is being tested by two major advertisers, including one in financial services, will report on environmental impacts (air, water, waste, land disturbance) alongside the economic factors such as cost and ROI. In this way, the marketing activities can be subject to a balanced scorecard of measures (environmental but also effectiveness) and optimised over time. It doesn’t mean the death of direct mail – if that proves the best option on a balanced reading of these criteria – but it does threaten ‘junk’ activities that are wasteful in every sense. 

 

And as well as managing impact, there are also likely to be outstanding new creative media ideas thrown up by environmental considerations. One early example is the NedBank posters from South Africa, which picked up the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes. The headline reads “What if a bank really did give power to the people?” The poster itself was a solar panel, which supplied electricity to several adjacent buildings, including a school. 

 

Ogilvy’s stunt of staging a flood in Second Life for Adventure Ecology to highlight the potential impact of global warming was also shortlisted in the Titanium category.  

 

Former US vice-president Al Gore was down at the festival this year too and was presented with the first-ever  Cannes ‘Green Award’. You can’t help feeling that it’ll become a heavily contested category.