Industry urged to embrace climate change campaign

Direct, digital and data marketing firms are being implored to sign up to a new climate change initiative, designed to advance the advertising and marketing industry’s response to the looming environmental crisis.
The campaign is kicking off at a new event, the Climate Crisis Summit, which is to take place on June 25 in central London. It aims to address how the industry can help limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2030 and will provide an opportunity to share views and strategies to tackle the issue.
The event is being organised by the “Purpose Disruptors Network”, a group of people working in the industry who want to explore how advertising can be more purposeful and responsible, and The Comms Lab, whose mission is to support the industry to use its skills to tackle the big issues of our time, including taking action on climate change.
Ahead of the event, the group has published an open letter, which has already attracted co-signatures from over 50 industry leaders across GroupM, MediaCom, AMV BBDO and Droga5 among many others, showing the clear appetite to tackle climate change at the highest level of the industry.
However, so far Proximity London is the only DM agency to have signed on the dotted line.
The letter states: “We are aware that as an industry, we have at times been complicit, knowingly or unknowingly, in exacerbating our current climate crisis through promoting unsustainable consumption on behalf of our clients.
“Yet, the very skills that have been used to shape the values, attitudes and behaviours of consumerism can also be used to help shift society to more sustainable ways of living. What do we need to start, stop and continue doing? What does industry leadership look like in the face of the climate crisis? Our choices now as an industry can help make the difference to the future of life on earth.”
While some in the DM industry have recognised the threat of single-use plastics – especially given direct mail’s contribution to the plastic waste mountain – the wider issue of climate change has been virtually ignored.
MediaCom managing partner Pauline Robson, who is also member of the Purpose Disruptors Network, said: “We come from different agencies, united by a deep concern about climate change and an understanding that there’s so much as industry we can do to tackle it. For lots of us, this is the first time we’ve done anything like this – we hope this is the start of a movement within the industry.”
Comms Lab co-founder Ella Saltmarshe added: “The scale and urgency of the climate crisis requires all of us to look at what we can do from where we stand. The summit will be an opportunity for the industry to engage with insight from the frontline of the environment movement, to process it collectively and ultimately to work together in new ways to tackle climate change.”
More information can be found at the Eventbrite website>