Mark Read, Ceo WPP, ha dfichiarato nella nota: “WPP is the world’s largest buyer of advertising space, managing more than $60 billion in media spend on behalf of our clients, and the world’s largest producer of advertising content. So we have the opportunity to make a real difference. By including emissions from the placement of advertising in our net zero commitment – a first for our industry – we aim to raise the bar for the whole sector. Two-thirds of our top clients have committed to set their own science-based reduction targets and we can play an important role in helping them to meet those targets in their operations and across their supply chains.mWe look forward to working with all our partners – many of whom have already made great strides in this area – to develop standards that will benefit the industry, our clients and our wider communities”.
Many media owners are already investing heavily in measuring and reducing their carbon emissions. Through GroupM, WPP’s media investment operation, WPP aims to work with its media partners to develop industry-wide standards for measuring and eliminating the carbon emitted from the placement of advertising in the media.
GroupM is consolidating its existing carbon calculators to allow a single view of emissions across channels in key markets, and make them available to clients at scale. Carbon data will increasingly be integrated into media partner procurement requests, and all media plans provided to clients will be net zero by the end of the decade.
Hogarth, WPP’s creative production business, has pioneered Sustainably Made, a approach that combines innovative virtual production techniques with industry-leading measurement tools and in-built carbon offset, to allow clients to produce work with a net-zero impact. WPP is also a founding member of AdGreen, a new initiative to remove the negative environmental impacts of production.
The net zero commitment follows other industry-leading sustainability initiatives from WPP. In 2020 WPP purchased 65% of its electricity from renewable sources, including 100% of electricity bought in the United States and, for the first time, in the UK, Canada and most European markets. In 2019, WPP was the first among its peers to commit to phasing out single-use plastics within its campuses.
