Sustainability as a Growth Driver: Insights from Industry Leaders on Building a Greener Media Ecosystem

Progress is being made to improve sustainable practices in advertising. However, until we reach a stage where it’s widely accepted that the best approach for business is also the sustainable one, reducing the industry’s carbon footprint at the rate required will be challenging.

This was the view of a group of leaders in advertising who gathered at our London forum, ‘Advancing Sustainable Media Together’ in early November 2024. The event brought together major players from brands, agencies and media owners including broadcast, digital, OOH and print advertising to share, learn and discuss ways in which the industry can drive real, positive change when it comes to sustainability.

The conversations were insightful, and one thing became crystal clear: building a sustainable media ecosystem requires learning together, showing results and making sustainability as simple as it is effective.

A Forum of Industry Leaders

We heard from Lisa Boyles, giffgaff and Claire Beavers, MG OMD who are working together on several innovations and initiatives to ensure sustainability is at the core of giffgaff’s business strategy. Lisa talked about its ‘Up to Good’ strategy, showcasing how giffgaff is challenging the established patterns of business and how being environmentally conscious can yield real business impact. For example, according to its most recent impact report, 70% of all phones sold by giffgaff were refurbished last year while all of the SIMs produced for giffgaff are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic.

We also heard from Chris Dooley about how JCDecaux works in partnership with cities to deliver advertising in the most sustainable way possible. For example, it was the first OOH media company to join the RE100 initiative, bringing together businesses around the world to promote renewable electricity.

Rounding out the panel with Chris were Anthony Crocker, The Daily Telegraph and Jeremy Mathieu, ITV - both of whom outlined what their media organisations are doing to drive sustainability internally. Anthony talked about the need for informed choices when using programmatic while Jeremy stressed the importance of having the right frameworks in place to ensure the sustainability team at ITV can best work in partnership and understand the needs of the rest of the business.

The day ended with two powerful messages. Our co-founder and COO, Anne Coghlan stressed the need for urgency to innovate and adopt change, while Dyana Najdi, Managing Director of UKI Partners & Specialists, Google spoke about harnessing AI responsibly. She shared the incredible things Google is doing with AI - how it has accelerated R&D by thousands of years, for instance - and encouraged marketers to consider the pace of innovation around AI. AI will be a moving target, so advertisers must keep what they hope to achieve with it in absolute focus or risk making a misstep or having to play catch-up.

Putting these insights into action, here’s what every marketer and media owner should take into 2025:

• Ensure senior stakeholders understand complexity - sustainability is complex. So is the media. It means the intersection of the two can be extremely challenging for those whose focus and expertise is in other parts of the business. Making it as simple as possible and demonstrating measurable impact is key to getting senior buy-in to initiatives.
• Prepare to fail the progression path is not linear. Some ideas will work, others won’t. What is important is the desire to experiment, try different ways of doing things, and not fear failure.
• Keep leading the charge - we must be accountable while learning because the industry doesn’t have years to become sustainable. Innovation alone isn’t enough. Our industry is good at innovating (think curation, viewability, and header bidding), but for it to make a real difference in our sustainability journey, it has to be combined with urgency.
• Collaboration is key, especially with the naysayers - there will always be the cynics and non-believers… those people are important, too. The ones who say ‘it can’t be done’ ignite action among others and expose the biggest challenges to adoption or change.
• The biggest threat and opportunity is AI - AI is having a transformational impact across all areas of our life. Harnessing AI can be hugely effective in sustainability if we approach it responsibly. Decarbonising the process is essential.