‘Responsible’ media costs more: can procurement and auditors change?

Opinion

Supporting responsible and sustainable media takes time and care to plan and buy. So why have media trading practices barely changed?

The World Federation of Advertisers does a great job of encouraging its members to advertise “responsibly”, working to environmental, societal and governance principles (ESG) that are now mandatory in business.

It’s also disarmingly honest on just how hard this is. At its Global Marketer Week in Athens this month, the environmental sustainability of today’s marketing industry was called into question.

How can we promote consumption and still make it ecologically-friendly?

Yes, advertising can help get the green message across. But most advertising is inherently not environmentally friendly if it encourages additional waste.

While the ad industry can, and should, press hard on initiatives such as Ad Net Zero from the Advertising Association, it’s clear that this will have a limited impact on the bigger problem of consumer consumption.

And that’s just the E bit of ESG. The rest is vast sea of hard issues, including diversity, equity and inclusivity and best practice in whom we trade with and how (Russia being a good and recent example).

Media trading has barely changed for the ESG era

These issues have been live now for some time, and some signs of progress exist but there is one area that appears not to have received the memo, and that is in media buying.

Media agencies have fully embraced the need to work to ESG principles in day-to-day operations by, for example, calculating carbon emissions on media plans and signing up to initiatives such as the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

But the way that media trading is conducted has barely changed to accommodate these new initiatives.

This is best illustrated in media pitches. The media agencies will flaunt their credentials in ESG (and there is little differentiation in this) but when it comes to the famous ‘grids’ of media pricing, these principles are largely ignored.

Sadly, the media cost ‘blind auction’ (which is essentially what it is) is a downward spiral where the competing agencies outbid each other to demonstrate savings (often illusory).

Whatever the planners say, the media free-for-all is usually conducted in isolation and often before the plans have been written. It is unusual if the two processes are joined up.

So the planners may propose all manner of great initiatives but the media traders either can’t adjust their pricing accordingly or won’t, in case this leads to a lack of competitiveness.

Advertising responsibly costs more, and this applies to media at least as much as creative and production. Selecting the right media partners to support ESG planning takes time and care to plan and buy, and the low-cost media trading mechanisms, such as programmatic, do not lend themselves to the kind of curation that conscious placement needs.

Yet the grids are produced anyway. The procurement departments in client companies may be supportive of CAN and other initiatives, but when the chips are down, the lowest (not necessarily best) price wins.

Media agencies do not dare to price their media offers at a higher level to reflect their ESG-led planning, and with so much fee at stake on media-buying performance, they won’t.

Measurement is not easy as no benchmarks exist for ‘conscious’ media, as opposed to ‘unconscious’ media presumably, so everyone defaults to the same-old.

This won’t change until procurement practice catches up with the agenda being pursued in their wider businesses. The more enlightened procurement people may be aware of the conflict, but it’s not institutionalised.

Advertisers must be brave