Purpose Disruptors Launch 'The Great Reset Fortnight' with Ecoffectiveness Methodology
The Great Reset Fortnight, a series of events and workshops designed to empower communications professionals to accelerate the fight against the climate crisis, kicks off on 28th April 2021 at 1pm with a free industry workshop on ‘Ecoffectiveness: The Missing Measure’.
Key to ensuring the creative communications industry helps society and business to reduce its collective carbon footprint, is re-evaluating what it measures and celebrates as ‘success’.
The first event of the series, this virtual workshop will feature international industry experts from well known agencies Caroline Davis (Managing Director and Sustainability Lead, ELVIS) and Ben Essen (Chief Strategy Officer, Iris) who will share the Ecoffectiveness framework - a new methodology for analysing and the carbon impact of our work, and unlocking the creative strategies to do it.
Major brands are increasingly committed to a new key business metric: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero. Yet none of the industry’s existing success measures are fit for purpose.
Ben Essen, chief strategy officer, Iris, said: “We developed the Ecoffectiveness framework as an invitation to help answer one question: if profitability and emissions have always grown hand in hand, how do we uncouple them? By taking on 21st century advertising’s most significant challenge, we hope the UK can live up to its reputation as world leaders in marketing effectiveness.”
Caroline Davison, managing partner, ELVIS, added: “Reducing emissions while maintaining profitability is a challenge that all of us in the industry must take responsibility for. It’s going to be hard, and difficult decisions definitely lie ahead, but we need to face into them and do it together in a way that is honest, consistent and open for all. This practical framework sets out how we can start to do that and helps agencies and clients to see how their success metrics can evolve accordingly.”
The new methodology incorporates three key elements:
- Transparent reporting of the incremental uplift in greenhouse gas emissions driven by advertising – to create a core data set from where improvements can be tracked
- Establishing an industry standard ‘Return on CO2e’ (the revenue generated for every tonne of CO2 equivalent emitted) – to provide a consistent approach that allows for comparison across sectors and campaigns
- Building insights by identifying Levers of Ecoffectiveness – a model which adapts Iris’ award-winning evaluation framework to identify where headroom exists and what methods can be used to reduce impact while maintaining profitability
Jonathan Wise, co-founder of Purpose Disruptors and 2008 IPA Effectiveness Gold winner said: “A primary goal of advertising is to sell and yet, as a strategist, I came to realise that the better I was at my job, the more damage I did. This is because a consequence of increasing sales, is the increase in carbon emissions this consumption generates. If we want to celebrate the sales growth we create, we have to take responsibility for the associated carbon uplift. That’s on us. This new initiative provides a simple way for the industry to step up and take our place in helping society and business to reduce our collective carbon footprint.”
The Great Reset Fortnight, organised by Purpose Disruptors Ireland will give Irish advertisers, marketers, creatives and communications professionals the chance to learn more about the impact this industry can have in Ireland’s fight against climate change. These sessions will be the first of their kind in Ireland with the aim of reshaping the advertising and marketing communications industry to only promote attitudes, lifestyles, behaviours and brands aligned with a net zero world by 2030. A number of ‘Change The Brief’ workshops will be designed for individuals across multiple disciplines, designed to inspire new thinking on how to assert agency and have impact, no matter your role or seniority.
