Sustainable Production: Jennie Mossman on Greener Experiences

Jennie Mossman is operations lead in Amplify's Live Team and has recently completed the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership course on Business Sustainability Management.

LBB> Can you tell us about your own personal journey when it comes to getting involved in sustainable production?

Jennie> My interest in sustainability has grown over the years, initially outside work in how I view everything from fashion, to recycling to nutrition. I’ve often struggled with the demand for newness and consumption in our industry and tried to explore ways to approach briefs and projects differently but always felt like I was lacking in specific knowledge and expertise. 

I’ve just completed the Business Sustainability Management course through University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, which covered topics including key sustainability challenges, regulations and policy, production and consumption, design and innovation and communication and marketing.

LBB> How do you tend to approach assessing and minimising the footprint of the productions you are involved in - and is this something that is built into your processes?

Jennie> Greener Experiences is our in-house always-on approach to working towards our goal, enacting change, guiding our team and informing everything we do with best practices designed to tackle the challenge and encourage collective responsibility.

From strategy and creative through to design and production, everyone at Amplify is encouraged to consider the footprint of an idea and its execution. As our experiences are brought to life, we constantly seek solutions to minimise their impact, whether that’s through our partners and materials or the scale, location or longevity of a concept.

More recently we have adapted our project management plans and production processes to put sustainability at the heart from introducing sustainability crits to a materials database and supplier procurement.

LBB> What have you been finding are the most useful tools, resources and partners for reducing environmental impact/carbon footprint of productions?

Jennie> Amplify is proud to be a founding member of isla, a non-profit organisation focused on taking collective action and responsibility for our industry’s impact on the environment. 

Isla is launching a Carbon and Waste measurement tool that captures data to provide an oversight of the environmental impact of projects.  It also generates impact reports in real time allowing you to set improvement targets and work towards these in a quantifiable way; as well as producing quantitative reporting that can be used to make recommendations to encourage improvement and identify future opportunities. 

LBB> What are the conversations that clients are having with you about their desire to reduce the carbon footprint and environmental impact of their production?  

It feels like most client briefs at least touch upon sustainability, however the actual commitment and desire to make a real change differs considerably. There is a real gap between people wanting to make a positive change but not really knowing how to achieve that in reality. There’s currently no consistency regarding measurement, everyone uses different methods, or attempts to build their own, defining what it covers and its scope. The measurements need to have consistency across the industry, and crucially, there needs to be an ease around conducting this. It’s one of the reasons we support Isla on taking a collective approach. 

LBB> In some ways it seems that when it comes to reducing carbon footprint, the advertising and marketing industry is focused almost exclusively on production. What are your thoughts on this - is it a positive that production is able to take the lead or is there a risk that the industry will take the win and fail to look elsewhere (e.g. media)?

Jennie> Our approach covers production, travel & accommodation, energy and food and water as we identified these areas as having the biggest impacts and opportunities to measure and make real change. Around 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design phase (WRAP) so it’s imperative we embed sustainability right from the start.

LBB> How is sustainability being built into your training and development for members of the live team?

Jennie> We’ve been rolling out Isla learnings across the team and ensuring that our team is learning on the job itself, through experiencing opportunities and being regularly exposed to our core sustainability goals.

LBB> Finally, to what extent do you think the production world will retain and build on the lessons learned during the pandemic?

Jennie> The past two years have taught us that to be productive, we don’t need to travel to one place. We’ve learnt to slimline our approach to this and maximise the results, without detriment to the work. Additionally, as an industry, we had to embrace virtual meetings and this is something we’ll retain beyond the pandemic.

Image credit: Edward Howell via Unsplash