Ziggy Stardust and the Mumbrella Awards
Last week, James Greet went to the movies and saw the 50th anniversary of Bowie's killing off of Ziggy Stardust at his seminal 1973 gig at the Hammersmith Odeon...
The opening track on the Ziggy Stardust album is my favourite Bowie song of all time: Five Years. The story of hearing a newscaster tell the world that we only have five more years to live…
“News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying”
Three nights later, I was at the Mumbrella Awards handing out an award to the heroes at Compass Studio – the well-deserved winners of the Sustainable Practice award.
Usually these two experiences might not connect. But they did last week.
Five years might not be all we got but we do only have just over six more summers to bring our emissions down by 50% by 2030.
If we want to stand a chance of keeping the warming of the planet to within +1.5c of pre-Industrial levels that is.
Yet, of the 1,650 awards submitted this year for Mumbrella, including the 47 I also judged for the world-changing most innovative media idea, it seems only nine organisations deemed their efforts towards sustainability worthy enough to write home about.
And of these nine there was only one multi-national agency, one brand, and one media owner – the rest being Independent agencies of all shapes and sizes that realised their sense of agency to build sustainability into their core values from day one, and not as an after-thought.
Seems there’s potentially a lot of influential companies out there that emit a lot of carbon from their advertising and media activities missing from this list.
To these companies I’d urge one thing: start building and actioning that decarbonisation plan now.
Measuring your baseline footprint and then simply offsetting is not a plan.
Measuring and putting proper reduction strategies with measurable and accountable outcomes in place is.
Especially so when the leaders of those companies show up and own them in their personal KPI’s too.
If you’re not sure on how to start consider the below as some simple steps to prompt action:
1. Get an internal ‘team’ together to lead and own this – more chance of embedding the changes required to share the load and take real action fast, than taking the ‘fire warden’ approach to this.
2. Get your own house in order by working with an independent measurement partner to measure the base line for your organisations carbon emissions through energy, waste and travel etc.. Then define the actions and timeline needed to reduce these. Only then offset what remains through qualified removal schemes.
3. Understand how the business of what your organisation does actually creates emissions. This might be through the production of advertising and content, the planning and buying of media, the management of events, or all of the above. Learn what measurement systems are in place, or emergent, to create baselines for these and understand what best practice guidelines exist that you can adopt to create a reduction plan. The UK is an advanced reference point here.
Markets such as the UK which are some three to four years ahead, are already showing the benefits of building and actioning plans. They’re simple to pick up and get started. You’ll save money. You’ll have a better business. You’ll do good for the planet.
It’s 2023. It’s just good business.
You’ll also have a decent shot at the Sustainable Practice award at Mumbrella 2024. Though we’ll only have five more years left by then. Hope to see you there.
James Greet is co-founder of The Payback Project in Australia.
