A year ago, research by ad agency Euro RSCG London found that the environment was in the top three of consumers' concerns. Last month, it had dropped to seventh.
Despite this change in priorities, the green agenda should not cease to be a concern for UK companies. From October, the Department of Energy and Climate Change's Carbon Reduction Commitment will require any company that consumes more than 6000MWh of electricity annually (thought to comprise the UK's biggest 5000 firms) to measure its energy emissions and then buy 'allowances' equivalent to these emissions each year in order to offset them. The emissions trading scheme is expected to save participants £1bn by 2020.
Clearly this provides a commercial motivation to reduce energy use, and one that will permeate all departments. Marketers will soon be under pressure to reduce the energy produced by their campaigns, not just to demonstrate their sense of corporate responsibility to consumers, but to actively save costs.
The next step for these marketers is to ask for changes within their agencies and to look at the entire process of advertising creation from start to finish. The COI already asks pitching agencies about their environmental policy, and is looking at how it can build this requirement into its procurement process more formally. Marketers failing to address these issues now, regardless of the recession, may well be called to account in the future.
Other companies that have built environmental sustainability into their marketing strategies are also studying this. Unilever's 'Brand Imprint' programme involves an analysis of the social, economic and environmental impact of a brand. To date, this has resulted in initiatives such as the sustainable sourcing of tea, but it will also extend to the process of ad creation.
Sky, too, has been busy reducing its carbon footprint, and helping customers, suppliers and employees to do the same, through 'The Bigger Picture', a corporate responsibility initiative encompassing hundreds of employees across the business.
'We know we can do more, with the aid of suppliers,' says Jo Fox, deputy director of The Bigger Picture. 'We've set up a Sustainability Action Group for our TV production partners, and moved to a hybrid-only taxi roster. Behind the scenes, we're working with other major advertisers to look at how we might make ad production more sustainable and more environmentally friendly.'
The extent to which the advertising industry has embraced the need to reduce the energy produced in company offices, and in the actual creation of ads, varies by agency. WPP decided two years ago that it would aim to be carbon-neutral by 2011. Although this has largely resulted in the buying of offsets - which critics claim is a largely spurious exercise - WPP informed its individual agencies that actual energy savings should also be made.
JWT London is among those agencies. It has been working hard to reduce its energy consumption and waste creation, and increase recycling, since it was audited by the Carbon Trust in May 2007. 'Just fitting sensor lights and making sure they are switched off after 9pm has reduced our CO2 emissions by 25%,' says Kate Bruges, co-director of talent at the agency.
In the first month of 2008, the agency cut nine tonnes of carbon out of its emissions and shaved £1200 off its energy bill from the combined effect of reduced use of lights, and installing printers that use both sides of a sheet of paper.
McCann Erickson, meanwhile, encourages staff to use public transport rather than cabs. 'The current economic climate means that we're all looking to be more cost-effective anyway,' says marketing director Vicky Oakes. 'The upside to the recession is that the industry's excessive spending habit is being curbed.'
Euro RSCG London has ample motivation to think green, given that its clients include EDF Energy, Peugeot-Citroen and the Carbon Trust. The agency offsets its CO2 emissions through The Carbon Neutral Company - paying to support environmental projects abroad. However, managing partner Russ Lidstone admits that he regards offsetting as akin to 'drinking Diet Coke while eating crisps'.
Euro RSCG's recent campaign for EDF Energy featured 'recycled footage'. Although Lidstone accepts that this could have been seen as a gimmick, he points out that 'the green bandwagon can be a good thing if it encourages everyone to make small changes'.
The agency's head of TV also wrote to its production companies, asking them to think about how they could reduce the CO2 emissions created in the course of filming TV ads. 'That was a bit of a shock to them,' says Lidstone. 'But we're seeing changes.'
Some TV production companies had already been analysing ways to reduce their energy consumption. Danny Fleet, managing director of Hotspur and Argyle, says he has received 'relatively little' pressure from ad agencies to make changes but has done so nonetheless. He uses only electric vehicles to transport people, equipment and props around, and is more likely to use UK locations for ads, and to travel there by train.
Shooting abroad has always been a good way of guaranteeing enough hours of sunshine for a shoot, and Fleet says it is possible to get good exterior shots of foreign locations while minimising one's carbon footprint. 'It may just be a case of flying a crew to Spain, rather than South Africa,' he explains.
However, the CO2 emissions of agencies are likely to be dwarfed by the environ-mental impact of the media channels carrying the ads. Moreover, analysing the relative environmental impact of different media is a complex business. Australian media evaluation agency Trinity P3, which plans to launch a UK office later this year, has analysed various campaigns to work out which channels are the most environ-mentally damaging.
The surprising result is that internet ads are often the biggest carbon-emission culprits, principally because the relatively low financial cost for advertisers encourages them to produce high-volume campaigns. 'We studied a campaign that was targeting 1m people with 76m ads over the course of six weeks,' says Darren Woolley, managing director of Trinity P3. 'The waste involved was enormous.'
Computer servers require a vast amount of electricity, both to power them and the air-conditioning necessary to keep them cool. A report by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, published in December, quoted McKinsey research which found that the information and communication technology industry's CO2 emissions are comparable to those of aviation.
Sustainability and communications agency Clownfish has also evaluated the emissions associated with media channels. Founder and chief executive Diana Verde Nieto agrees that internet ads can lead to the highest emissions, but she still believes that the medium offers the best potential for low-carbon advertising. 'With a greater degree of targeting, the carbon impact can be significantly reduced,' she says.
Google is also conscious of its responsibility to reduce its impact at source. It recently committed $20m (£14m) to an investment in wind and solar power and has pledged to be producing 50MW of renewable energy by 2012.
Other media organisations have been trying to reduce their impact. Poster companies including Clear Channel and JC Decaux recycle some material and use vehicles powered by alternative means. But, says Verde Nieto, the emissions from the electricity used to backlight posters and power broadcast sites, the use of which is growing, could cancel out any gains from such initiatives. That said, the first wind- and solar-powered billboard was recently unveiled in New York, and although owner Ricoh does not plan to launch it in the UK, this demonstrates the possibilities.
It is certainly a difficult time for marketers to be asking the media industry to make significant investments in environmentally friendly technology, but the drive to reduce the impact of their campaigns shows no sign of letting up. The challenge will be the extent to which each group in the marketing food chain can work with others to bring about real change, while keeping the process profitable for all.