Eco-Effectiveness

The challenge of media decarbonisation lies in balancing sustainability with effectiveness. In 2021, Wavemaker set out to address this challenge, and to find a way that decarbonised media plans without compromising their effectiveness.

Wavemaker was a lead partner in the creation of the GroupM Carbon Calculator – the first of its kind in quantifying the emissions from our clients’ media investment – and made a commitment to add the carbon emissions associated to every media plan on every client. However, whilst a critical first step, quantifying the emissions associated with our clients’ plans would only take us so far. Up until that moment, the recommendations for decarbonisation mainly involved a reduction in the level of media investment, because less spend means fewer emissions. Yet that sits in direct tension with what a media agency is ultimately there to do; grow its clients’ businesses.

Wavemaker developed the Eco-Effectiveness approach to go beyond simply measuring carbon emissions. Traditional recommendations for reducing emissions, such as lowering media investment or avoiding high-emission channels, often conflicted with our goal of growing clients’ businesses. Our aim was to find a way to decarbonise media plans without compromising their effectiveness, leading to the creation of the Return On Carbon (ROC) metric and the Eco-Effectiveness optimiser.