“Marketers need to get into the nitty gritty and learn about lifecyle assessments and how they are used, their limitations and their advantages, it might seem boring - but it’s really, really important.”

In this episode, we’re joined by Oliver-Bealby-Wright, Lead, Consumers in the Energy System who formerly led Consumers International’s GreenCommerce project in 2022 on improving consumer sustainability information. Consumers International is a membership body with over 200 members across 100 countries, dedicated to defending the rights of consumers.

“The best companies look at their ESG disclosures as a type of social contract to tell the world, why they are here, what they are trying to achieve as a business, why the world is arguably a better place because they are here. ESG disclosure is an opportunity for an organisation to show how it is creating value - financial value and non-financial value.”

It was an absolute privilege to have some time talking all things ESG with Professor Ioannis Ioannou from London Business School. Ioannis through his work and research is a leading academic, consultant and leading expert around ESG integration.

“Can we accept that change requires us to stop things. If the industry can come to terms with that, then we have a great opportunity to let new possibilities come through.”

Diving into latest updates from their advertised emissions research they showcase how in 2019 advertised emissions equated to 186M tonnes and how in 2022, their recent research has seen an 11% increase in advertised emissions in UK… “The more advertising there is, the more sales, the more advertised emissions.”

“Sustainability is making marketing exciting again…”

Gemma and I are used to asking the questions on our Can Marketing Save the Planet podcast - but in this episode, we were interviewed for a live ‘MarketingKind Digital Fireside’ session hosted by Caroline Taylor, sustainable marketing trailblazer and former CMO at IBM - together with the wonderful founders of Marketing Kind and a great bunch of fellow marketers.

For those of you that don’t know about MarketingKind… it’s a community of business leaders, marketers and change-makers who come together to make marketing mean more.

“If you double your marketing budget, you don’t necessarily get double the sales because of diminishing returns, but when it comes to carbon emissions, doubling your budget, may not just double but quadruple your CO2 emissions. As marketers we need to understand the impact of our plans and activities and consider a new set of priorities and KPIs.”

And we couldn’t agree more…

As you’ll hear in this podcast interview with Jo Young, Managing Director at Unifida, Gemma and I were keen to find out more about how their data and carbon counter is helping marketers to green their marketing by understanding the carbon impact of their planned activities.

Do you ask yourself as a marketer, “with all the decisions I took today, did I accelerate the transition to net zero, or slow it down? If the conclusion at the end of the day is that you slowed it down - well you really don’t want to be there. Accelerating the transition is where marketers need to be.”

Wim advises that all marketers should ‘put the planet in the room’ - literally. Tune in to the third question we ask all guests in our round up - as to how this action changes everything.

“Marketers have the largest job of the lives ahead of them. They have got to drive systemic behaviour change and move us collectively from this linear extractive wasteful, entirely unsustainable model of consumption, that our whole economy and economics is currently based on, and move people over to the sustainable circular economy.”

Food waste is one of the largest problems facing humanity today – the statistics are startling. Globally a third of all food we produce - that’s over a trillion US$ of food is being thrown away every year.  If food waste was a country it would be the 3rd largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

“How are we (marketers) going to tell a true story about climate and our impact on the climate, so that we can change the systems in our lives, so that we tread more resiliently on the earth, and are more proud of what we are doing, and as a byproduct, build better communities with more equity and fairness?"

A question we explore in-depth with the marketing legend, Seth Godin.

It was an absolute pleasure talking to Seth, who really needs no introduction - entrepreneur, writer and one of the world's most famous bloggers and thinkers and more recently, coordinator and champion of 'The Carbon Almanac', a project he describes, "as the most important of his career".

“Advertising can be important as it can make new ideas win and kick out old ideas – but campaigns aren’t trying to kick anything out – they’re just saying, you can have us as well. Where are the train campaigns that are aggressively going after the airliners, where are the co-owned car services that are aggressively going after the SUVs?”

Gustav tells us how he was fast becoming disillusioned with some of the campaigns he was working on - (broken hearted in some cases) - with assignments becoming less playful and far more commercial. “The internet was moving from being a distributed democratic playground into a cloud controlled user experience owned by a few players - giving them control over creativity and messaging - and that felt a bit scary and weird - and not the environment I really loved.”