On stage at GroupM’s ‘Entering the Next Era of Outdoor Media: People Powered DOOH' event, a panel of out of home (OOH) executives talked transparently about the impact digital out of home (DOOH) marketing is having on sustainability and the environment.
Hosted by Aimee Buchanan, GroupM CEO, the panel was asked what is happening from digital out of home to minimise the impact of marketing on the environment.
Charmaine Moldrich, CEO of Outdoor Media Association (OMA), said: “None of us can walk away from what is happening to our planet, none of us. And we all need to be part of that change.
“As an industry body, part of what we do is our call for good - we really have to be the givers of those messages.
“It started with doing small things like giving away 10% of our inventory each year to charitable arts and sports causes, really taking that focus outside of OOH to not just sell stuff, but to tell people active messages that's important.
“Julie Jensen, OMA’s director of marketing, is working with the industry to start by getting our [digital out of home] panels carbon neutral.
“More importantly we need to get our businesses carbon neutral, and ask the businesses that supply our screens to also be looking at that.
“We are building guidelines. Again, we're starting small, but we've got great plans for going into that space.
“From a sustainability point of view, something I think gets missed a lot because people are focused on climate change, is making the industry more sustainable by making it more diverse.
“And that, for me, is a really, really important legacy project that I would like to leave behind - that our industry, in order to move into the future and be future focused, also needs to look like the world looks like now. And it doesn't.
Paul Butler, managing director at Val Morgan Outdoor, said: “We're very close to completing a significant strategic initiative with Ernst and Young who is our consultants on this whole area, around our corporate sustainability.
“The easiest thing, which we have been doing for a number of years, is for us to use more energy efficient screens across our digital network. And I would argue that digital networks probably do save as well in terms of this.
“There’s no physical driver needed to put the poster up, so there's no wastage of that.
“But they are energy intensive. So using better sources of energy is super important and we deploy really efficient screens across our network.
“We are working on how we work across more renewable sources of energy with our supply chain to ensure that we're doing a better job around that. And it's a holistic type of approach across that whole supply chain.”
James Lambert, head of Sightline, said: “From our standpoint we are really keen to go on the journey and actually try and create some type of a marketplace that specifically aligns with that sustainability piece.
“We’ve still got a little way to go. But we're going to get there much more quickly with the help of our partners.”
Aimee Buchanan, GroupM CEO, said: “Our ambitions are ideally to be measuring the admission of every campaign we run and looking to offset and minimise.
“We would love to minimise and reduce more. But I think the struggle we have with the grids in Australia is that they have a carbon impact three to four times more than what we see in Europe in the US because it's a fossil fuel based grid.
“Which means offsetting is probably for many of us going to be the short term plan, but yet lots more to come on that.”
Instead of gifting the attending audience a media swag bag after the session, in line with GroupM’s sustainability initiatives they instead planted one tree for every individual who attended, totalling 123 trees being planted.
Once they reach maturity within the next three to five years, the trees will have pulled out around two and a half tonnes of carbon, which is the same amount of carbon an individual driving around Australia in an average car for 15,000 kilometres generates.
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