The Advertising Association promotes the role and rights of responsible advertising and its value to people, society, businesses and the economy. We represent UK advertisers, agencies, media owners and tech companies on behalf of the entire industry, acting as the connection between industry professionals and the politicians and policy-makers.

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The Advertising Association focuses on major industry and policy areas that have huge ramifications on UK advertising. This section contains our work around public health, gambling advertising, data and e-privacy, trust, the digital economy and more.

Credos is the advertising industry’s independent think tank. It produces research, evidence and reports into the impact and effectiveness of and public and political response to advertising on behalf of UK advertisers in order to enable the industry to make informed decisions.

Front Foot is our industry’s member network of over 90 businesses across UK advertising. It aims to promote the role of responsible advertising and its value to people, society and the economy through a coalition of senior leaders from advertisers, agencies and media owners.

We run a number of events throughout the year, from our annual LEAD summit to the Media Business Course and regular breakfast briefings for our members. We are also the official UK representative for the world’s biggest festival of creativity – Cannes Lions.

Green Element: The advertising industry’s climate strategy

/ October 8th 2020
Action 1 Resources Ad Net Zero

The climate change strategy from the Advertising Association’s Climate Action Working Group is to reduce emissions in line with climate science, and to achieve real net-zero on the Science Based Targets initiative 1.5C cap trajectory to 2050, but on an accelerated path to do so in this service industry by the end of 2030. In brief this entails: 

  • Setting a science-based target aligned to limiting global heating to 1.5C 
  • Achieving this target through energy-saving strategies, decarbonisation of energy supplies, and reductions in emissions from business travel 
  • To declare net-zero, all unavoidable residual emissions must be physically removed through carbon dioxide removal measures such as direct air carbon capture and storage (e.g. Carbfix via Climeworks), afforestation and reforestation, land restoration and soil carbon sequestration, enhanced weathering and ocean alkalinisation  
  • We encourage investments in sustainable development and carbon offset projects that contribute to a low carbon and sustainable global future; however these cannot be used in carbon accounting to negate residual emissions since studies have shown that 73% of carbon offset projects supplying Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) do not remove the quantity of carbon that they claim to – and there are offset projects that, although environmentally and often societally positive, are not removing any atmospheric carbon at all.  Therefore, using offset projects and carbon credits in order to make a declaration of net-zero is potentially misleading, and should be avoided.