Putting Sustainability Into Action: A case study with Sanofi and Scope3

In the first half of 2023, Scope3 ran a pilot program with 5 global brands participating in the WFA’s Planet Pledge. The pilot was conducted to understand how adding carbon as a campaign metric impacted performance. Every test demonstrated that removing high carbon inventory had no negative reach or performance implications. One brand in the study was global healthcare and pharmaceutical company, Sanofi.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human health. As a global healthcare company Sanofi is focused on improving people’s lives. Today, that goes hand-in hand-with preserving a healthy planet. That’s why sustainability is truly central in their governance and strategic decisions at all levels. They started by improving the efficiency of their physical supply chains (like production and manufacturing), but it became clear the global media team could play a role in making progress on these pillars, too. This realization led to an innovative marketing opportunity with Scope3.

Step 1: Picking a measurement partner

Knowing that digital advertising can make up a large portion of a company’s carbon emissions, pushed Sanofi to explore a variety of carbon measurement solutions for analyzing their footprint of their digital a emissions. Sanofi wanted a solution that could satisfy two needs: granular and specific emissions measurement and actionable reduction tactics that could be implemented quickly and easily. Ultimately, Sanofi decided to partner with Scope3 because of the comprehensive, sophisticated and granular climate solutions offered.

Step 2: Getting baseline measurement

Using its proprietary emissions model, the Scope3 solutions team kicked off the engagement by conducting tests across several European markets to measure the overall carbon footprint of Sanofi’s digital advertising and identify areas for improvement.

Step 3: Finding and implementing areas of reduction

The solutions team worked directly with Sanofi to provide recommendations for how the company could make ad campaigns lower carbon and more efficient. These included:

• Tailored strategies for reducing carbon emissions in each market and pinpointing areas of climate risk (high carbon) inventory
• Surfacing the concept of made for advertising (MFA) sites, a key contributor to climate risk inventory and a facet of the industry Sanofi, like most brands, had never considered
• Implementing exclusion lists to remove climate risk inventory (and MFA) from campaigns that produced high emissions
• Enabling inclusion lists in specific markets to focus investment on the best sites while ensuring KPIs were met
• Identifying opportunities to increase investment on low emissions, performant publisher sites

Results: As seen in the chart below, the tests conducted in the UK market showed a reduction of carbon emission by 56% compared to the pre-optimization period while campaigns in Spain had 30% reduction. Performance was not impacted in each of the tests.

Sanofi introduced carbon reduction methods across a variety of formats and device types and has more visibility into choosing efficient (sustainable + performant) buying paths and now aspires to scale emissions measurement and reduction to all 50+ markets where they have active media. The collaboration between Scope3 and Sanofi proves that effective and sustainable marketing campaigns are possible and do not need to come at a cost to performance.