Why You Should Make Sure You’re an AdGreen Carbon Calculator Early Adopter

How much impact does the advertising you’re making have on the environment? Increasingly, brands need to know this. And increasingly, agencies, production companies and anyone else making advertising needs to know the carbon footprint of their productions. The AdGreen carbon calculator launches on September 29th. Which means if you’re in any way producing advertising, you’ll be able to measure your impact like never before. Because, if you hadn’t heard, the world is in an absolute state thanks to humans belching carbon out into the atmosphere. And brands are, rightly, stumbling over each other to prove that they’re doing something to help prevent a catastrophe.

As the mission statement reads on the AdGreen website, “It's only by understanding our actions that we can make changes - measurement drives behaviour.” If you want to start driving down the carbon footprint of your productions and driving more sustainable behaviour, AdGreen is encouraging you to pre-register now. 

 

Only companies can register, enabling their staff to have access to the carbon calculator, either to input data or to review it. To speed things up, AdGreen’s developers will do a bulk set up of companies ahead of the tool’s launch on September 29th. AdGreen is inviting companies to register using the form here. Once a company is registered, staff will be able to apply for access immediately once the tool has launched.

The calculator is free at the point of use for the advertising production community, thanks to contributions from participating advertisers to the AdGreen levy on production spend. Making it available to all is vital to AdGreen. As Jo Coombes, founder and project director, puts it: “We want everyone to have the chance to access it, rather than just those who are particularly seeking it out.” Not wanting to put the burden of cost onto producers trying to take responsibility for their carbon footprint, AdGreen is funding the project through voluntary donations from brands (something Jo told us about in more depth a few months back).

The key aim of the calculator is to put a tool in people’s hands, enabling the industry to measure and reduce its emissions. “So the more widely available we can make all of our tools, the further we can get towards that ultimate aim. If we restrict access, then that aim is compromised because we aren't giving as much access to it as we can. We're trying to give everyone equal opportunities to have this visibility.”

The calculator has been going through design and development this summer. And in that time Jo and Sophie Broadbent, the project manager for the calculator project - both production professionals with a deep interest in sustainability - have been having some fairly regular discussions about what Jo calls the “game-changing nature of this calculator”.

The conversations that the calculator will inevitably provoke could be momentous. When brands see the emissions that are linked to each decision they and their agencies make, it’ll raise some serious points of discussion. “Disruption is what it's all about,” says Sophie. Speaking at a time when Extinction Rebellion is making headlines through widespread disruption of a very different kind, she admits there are some parallels, “AdGreen is doing that in a very business-y way, but it's definitely making changes,” she says.

Developed from BAFTA’s albert, an established online tool for measuring carbon in the Film and TV production community, the AdGreen calculator’s tools will share the same core calculator functionality, ensuring both industries benefit from upgrades and insight, but AdGreen's will have a unique structure, built bespoke for the advertising mode of production. 

And it’s comprehensive in its scope. For example, the calculator has a database of 309 electricity emission factors for different countries and states, meaning that wherever the office, studio or location is, the associated carbon will be relative to the location. 

The scope of the tool encompasses any stills, motion or audio project which is part of an advertising campaign. It takes into account four key areas: transport, spaces (encompassing non-filming spaces such as offices, locations and studios, and accommodation), materials (such as food, set build and decoration items, batteries and costume), and disposal of waste.

BAFTA’s albert calculator formed a strong foundation on which the AdGreen tool was built. “That calculator is tried and tested in broadcast and it's been going on for 10 years,” says Jo, who has been running AdGreen since 2014 and in partnership with the UK’s Advertising Association since 2020. “So for us, we built upon something that already existed as a kind of surety of success.”

They do of course understand that there are going to be certain carbon factors that need adjusting as we go. “And there's definitely a feeling from us that this is the first iteration, but not the final iteration,” says Jo. “We want to work with the users to understand where the sticking points are, where we can make improvements and where we can adjust things. And because we've got the same core calculator, any changes that we make can be carried across [to the albert tool] and vice versa.”

Frankly, Jo also notes that building on something that already exists made the project more cost-effective. “As a result, we've been able to build on what's already created and shown to be working, to create our own structure around it - tailored to the industry,” she says.

One key difference was making the calculator collaborative, factoring in cases like bigger jobs where there might be production service setups crossing borders. On any given production, there needed to be multiple inputs from multiple companies that can collaborate on the same project - brands, production consultancies, holding companies, parent companies - all these parties might want to review their footprints. 

“It's not only agencies who work directly with brands,” says Jo. “There are production companies who do that too and there are in-house agencies, in-house production companies and all these iterations of the way things get made in 2021. So we needed to make sure the tool reflected that. Our real life experiences have inspired us to build new mechanisms instead of just hoping it is flexible enough as it is.”

That knotty issue threw up some tricky design problems, not to mention the security structures that are needed to make sure permissions and levels of access are all up to industry standard. The AdGreen team have relied on a working group of industry production experts that have been a key factor in helping them make decisions and shape the tool. 

That means the tool is built by producers who know production in advertising for their peers. Both Jo and Sophie know the umpteen factors that need consideration on a given project, “so we're aware of the time pressures on production teams, whether you're an agency or a production company,” says Jo. “We want to make sure that it's been built with care and attention for the people that will be using it. It's really important to us.”

Sophie’s been in the industry for 20 years, working in commercials, branded content and also in broadcast. “My main aim is to make this really easy to use for everybody from all different backgrounds,” she says. She’s making it a priority to work with the many different shapes of production people who'll be using it to make sure that they can set it up in a way that works for them and to listen to all of their feedback and build on it.

Despite every miniscule detail it’s able to measure, one of AdGreen’s biggest goals was to avoid making calculating the emissions of a production too time consuming. “We've collaborated to make sure we haven't made things too convoluted or difficult to understand,” says Jo. “We want to create something that reflects how this work is both useful and user-friendly. We want people to realise that this calculator can help companies move toward that ultimate goal of measuring production’s carbon emissions.”

With pre-registration open for companies to get in on the ground floor, both Jo and Sophie are keen to stress the value of companies and brands adopting the calculator ahead of their competitors. “I think people will want to sell themselves by saying they’re already using the calculator, they have the skills and can offer this as a service to you," says Sophie.   

On September 29th people in advertising production will be able to use the calculator to provoke some weighty conversations with their production partners, as well as preparing themselves for making their work increasingly more carbon-conscious. Jo will be watching the response closely: “It forces companies to take that first step and I think it will be really interesting to see who engages with it, now that it will be open to them.”