Study Reveals 97.4% of US Ads Neglect Any Environmental-led Reference

Only 2.6% of television ads from the past three years included an environmental-led message according to System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform. The findings from System1’s report, The Greenprint USA, contrast with research from Certus Insights Poll, showing that 70% of consumers want to know what the brands they support are doing to address social and environmental issues. These statistics point to the untapped potential for advertisers to address environmental issues and encourage brands to leverage their advertising to encourage consumer actions that help address the urgent climate crisis.

The report analysed 1,000 US ads over a three-year period (2020 – 2023) using System1’s Test Your Ad platform, which measures emotional response to ads to predict their commercial impact. The report found:

• Diverse Areas of Environmental Focus. Nearly one in five ads focused on Energy/Water/Heating (19%), while nearly one in five featured Hybrid Cars (19%), followed by Waste Reduction (15%), Circular Fashion (15%), Alternative Transport/Electric Cars (11%), Animal Welfare (11%) and Meat and Dairy Alternatives (7%).
• Star Performers. LG, Hellman’s, Levi’s and Subaru are just a few of the brands that have incorporated sustainable messaging into their creative assets and achieved high marks with viewers according to System1’s Test Your Ad platform.
• Strategies Based on Behavioural Science: The Greenprint USA demonstrates how advertisers can leverage behavioural science methods such as the EAST Framework, which identifies four key principles, to make their messaging more impactful.

The Greenprint USA reveals six best-practice themes to facilitate more engaging and effective sustainable advertising. These are based on TV advertisements that achieved a high Star Rating, System1’s metric predicting long-term brand-building potential based on an ad’s creative quality. The six themes are:

• Hope Over Fear: Hope and surprise are the most effective emotions for building brands and driving change. Leveraging fear and anger in communications can lead to what behavioural science calls the ostrich effect: if you make people feel guilty, they put their heads in the sand.
• Stories Over Stats: Individual stories are much more powerful and memorable than abstract or statistical information. One useful tactic is to employ Fluent Devices – brand characters which recur across ads and build familiarity and positive emotion.
• Be Action Oriented: Encouraging behaviour changes among consumers starts by demonstrating the desired behaviours in advertising. Focusing on real people and real results achieved through action is inspiring and adds another level of authenticity to ads promoting sustainability.
• Meet Them 90% of the Way: Providing consumers with alternative solutions that are convenient, cost-effective, and still better for the environment lets sustainability feel more accessible. It taps into one of the most important and effective tenets of behaviour change: make the change as easy as possible.
• Use the Right Messenger: Messages land more effectively depending on who they come from, and different kinds of messengers will have different impacts.
• Entertain, Entertain, Entertain: Entertainment can help inspire change. Right-brained features like characters with agency, cultural references, narratives with clear storylines and melodic music are great at entertaining.

Jon Evans, chief customer officer at System1, emphasised the critical role of advertising to inspire long-term change stating, “The onus is on marketers and advertisers to lead the charge in addressing the climate crisis. The Greenprint USA serves as a guide for captivating audiences and empowering them to act. By demonstrating how brands can enhance creative effectiveness to support sustainability, they have the power to create a ripple effect of positive change.”

Richard Shotton, founder of Astroten, underscored the importance of following the EAST Framework when trying to encourage meaningful change among consumers, “If you’re going to design effective marketing, you need to understand consumers’ genuine motivations. By tuning in to what drives and appeals to people using behavioural science, brands can better leverage easy, attractive, social and timely methods to encourage change.”

To learn more about how brands can inspire positive climate action through advertising, download the full report here.