Annual Review 2022: Making Progress On Climate Action In The UK

Matt Bourn, Communications Director, Advertising Association

It’s been a significant second year in Ad Net Zero’s development, both here in the UK and internationally, as desire to take positive action to address climate change grows across the industry.

Let’s look at the progress in the UK. The supporter base continues to grow, with advertisers, agencies, media owners and tech companies engaging with Ad Net Zero and its action plan.

More companies are actively measuring their operational emissions and implementing best practice in the way they work. More companies are engaging with AdGreen’s training and tools around ad production while the work around carbon reduction in media planning is now being embraced at an international level. Sustainability criteria has been added to UK awards including those run by the DMA and the British Arrows, Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising prize and the Sky Zero Footprint Fund, while the isla tool is front and centre to help events of all kinds be more sustainable.

We began the year on the hunt for case studies of types of work our industry can do to support the transition to net zero and thanks to Campaign and Google, we ended with a series of winners of the first Campaign Ad Net Zero Awards. This new bank of work provides the beginning of what we believe will be a redefinition of creative excellence, celebrating work that is sustainably made and highly effective in support of a net zero economy. We continue to work on putting metrics around the real-world impact of successful advertising work and develop a practical certification framework, both essential to the progress of Ad Net Zero and its goal of making every ad a green ad.

Meanwhile our team has regularly updated policymakers at Westminster on our industry’s efforts to support the UK’s net zero plans. This engagement has taken a number of forms. Back in April, I appeared in the House of Lords to provide evidence to the Environment Committee on the role of advertising to help tackle climate change. It was a formative experience, answering questions posed by fifteen Lords and Baronesses. The resulting report which was published in September cites the need for our industry (and UK Government) to lead on behaviour change campaigns in this crucial decade. Advertising’s power to drive positive behaviour change is a topic I’ve been speaking more about, following the House of Lords report, taking me as far as Bucharest to speak at the International Advertising Association’s Create4Better conference.

Ad Net Zero has grown beyond the UK this year and later in this section my colleague, Anthony Falco shares more on what we’ve achieved.

We end the year with the exciting news that LIONS will be including a sustainability question in award entries in 2023, helping to build awareness of the work of Ad Net Zero. This is a fantastic boost for the initiative’s profile and objectives in the year ahead, because we will be able to benchmark progress globally.

We’ve much more to do and much more planned as we encourage the industry to take positive action as fast we can. Every year has a clear deadline – the Global Summit each November – we must race to show as much progress as we can by then.

Head to adnetzero.com to learn more about Ad Net Zero and how to become a supporter.

You can download a full copy of our 2022 Annual Review here.