A report from the Advertising Association last year found that public perceptions of advertising’s social contribution is improving; 44 percent of UK respondents said advertising drives positive change in society, up from 34 percent in 2021. Meanwhile 34 percent of people agreed that advertising helps them make more sustainable purchases.
However, these positive impacts on consumer behaviour can easily be overshadowed by the carbon emissions associated with advertising. According to video ad tech firm Good-Loop, the average online ad campaign emits 5.4 tonnes of CO2, more than the average car produces in a year. And some campaigners argue that a true reflection of the advertising industry’s environmental impact should also include emissions from the products that are sold as a result of ad campaigns.
Practical substitution
On the flip side of that argument, if advertising’s environmental impact should take into account the emissions it drives, it should also be credited with reducing emissions when it drives consumers to more sustainable products. This assumes advertising sways those already in market for a product, who in the absence of advertising would otherwise have bought a different version of that product.
And this assumption has precedent; the question of whether advertising grows markets, or merely a brands’ share of their particular market, has been the subject of periodical study since 1997, when advertising planner and econometrician Simon Broadbent published the seminal paper, ‘Does advertising grow markets?’
The study analysed 156 IPA case studies, and concluded that in the majority of cases, advertising was shown to have driven brand share but not market growth. Similar results were found in subsequent studies by Simon’s son Tim Broadbent, and Les Binet and Peter Field of the IPA Databank.
In her analysis of the research, Bridget Angear, Founding Partner at craig+bridget, a creative strategy consultancy, summarises the findings: “Across our case studies, and in markets more generally, some kind of substitution probably occurred: that when a consumer bought more of one thing, they bought less of something similar. The result was that the overall market did not grow.”
Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive of the Advertising Association, observes that the growth of one market tends to mirror the decline of another. “I spent all my career working in agencies, and many years working on mobile phones, when mobile phones were expanding massively,” he tells VideoWeek. “That was growing a very new market, and you tend to look at how that market grows. But what you don’t tend to do is look at the market that’s declining as a result; you don’t tend to focus on the decline in fixed line calls.”
This phenomenon could therefore lead to advertising helping to reduce emissions, if a sustainable market is growing at the expense of a more carbon intensive one. The car industry for example is transitioning towards electric vehicles (EV), and ad spend is disproportionately weighted towards promoting EVs.
“I think that’s an example of where advertising is presenting an aspirational version of the future,” comments Matt Bourn, Director Of Communications at the Advertising Association, and co-author of the 2024 book ‘Sustainable Advertising’. “It’s priming people that their next car purchase will be some kind of EV or hybrid. And then what’s happening is the brands are competing to say, we’ve got the best version of that.”
Limiting factors
Yet while the industry has positive ambitions in shaping consumer behaviour, basing the perceived effects of advertising on what advertising should be doing risks complacency – and as one sustainability activist in the industry tells VideoWeek: “Science doesn’t care about what we hope to be true; science is science.”
In reality, ad agencies are still working with fossil fuel companies, whose pollutive effects massively diminish efforts to shift consumer behaviour. Research from activist group Clean Creatives reveals that all the major agency groups have fossil fuel companies on their books, making it hard to argue that the industry is not driving carbon emissions.
At the same time, the industry is largely focused on driving sales, and awards campaigns that do so most effectively. And while many industry awards do include sustainability categories, the main prizes are generally reserved for those ads that drive sales irrespective of the product and its production. As the sustainability expert says: “Either advertising is effective and it sells stuff, or it doesn’t.”
Then there are emissions driven by the delivery of ads themselves, including those that are never seen by a human being. Estimates from the ANA suggest the average programmatic campaign runs across 44,000 websites, creating huge amounts of waste. Again the industry is working to reduce this through supply chain optimisation (SPO) and transparency efforts, but ad fraud and made-for-advertising (MFA) websites remain intense sources of carbon emissions.
Finally there are the emissions that stem from climate mis- and disinformation that are also fuelled by advertising. In 2023, research from the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition found that over 150 ad exchanges monetise climate mis- and disinformation, while brand-safe climate content goes underfunded due to keyword blocklists. So while advertising can be used to push consumers towards more sustainable products, ensuring they have access to science-based reporting on climate change would presumably make for an easier sell.
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