GTB Summer 2024 Member Meeting
Green The Bid’s Summer 2024 Meeting welcomed the presentation The Pledge: How Agencies Are Holding Brands (And Themselves) Accountable featuring guest speakers Katie White Hartranft, VP and Account & Sustainability Director at The Martin Agency, and Jenny Reed, President & Partner at Slim Creative.
Throughout her career, Katie has embraced the challenge to fight advertising production’s seemingly-invisible carbon impact. As VP and Account & Sustainability Director at The Martin Agency, she is focused on both reducing the agency's footprint and helping brands navigate and implement sustainable thinking throughout the creative process. She has supported industry change by launching open source tools like the Sustainability Tension Map, and leads efforts for low impact productions like executing zero-waste sets, carbon tracking/offsetting, and sustainable travel protocols.
Jenny has earned numerous prestigious awards and has led groundbreaking initiatives for sustainability and production. Currently President and Chief Production Officer at her newly formed agency, Jenny continues to push these initiatives forward through Slim's unique production process. Recently Jenny was Chief Production Officer of Publicis Group in the U.S., where she led a collective of 600+ . Her work for sustainability and DEI in production are goals she continues to prioritize at Slim Creative.
Both speakers had meaningful driving forces in the beginning stages of their agency sustainability initiatives. Katie says she was influenced by her father’s work in sustainable business and saw a need for it specifically within the advertising industry. “Growing up, he instilled a love of nature, biophilia, biomimicry; I was fascinated by all of that in terms of how it inspires innovation. Advertising is one of the places where we're perpetuating climate change. I figured, well, maybe I can make a difference and change how we do business,” says Katie. Jenny said that COVID emphasized the contribution that the ad industry makes with pollution. “The pandemic, when it limited travel, drastically decreased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions within just a few weeks around the globe. I think it gave us all pause to the changes in the environment during COVID – cleaner water, clearer skies; it was now impossible to ignore. COVID really forced production to be approached differently. It showed that we were still able to achieve high end, complex productions from our living rooms. It started having you question: how many people did we really need on a shoot? How many location changes did we really need to make?” she said.
They also walked through the different processes each had in beginning their sustainable agencies. Jenny said that her initiatives at Publicis Group relied heavily on GTB resources to create a three-phase plan. “The first phase was taking all the materials that you had and creating our own templates from this and handbooks for producers for all of the stakeholders – making sure that everybody had all of the information at their fingertips on what it would take to create a sustainable production. From there, we were able to retool whatever materials that we already had, take those learnings and move into phase two. In phase two, we developed case studies based on what we did. We wanted to roll this out to executive leadership and invite new stakeholders into the sustainable efforts. Then we would move into phase three, which was to help the industry move forward. (This was to) integrate agency-network wide objectives with our production objectives, and then start publishing goals and sustainability reports on a higher level, year over year,” said Jenny. Katie followed with her approach, saying, “We started internally with what can we do in the kitchen? What can we do around the building? We also took a lot of cues from Green The Bid, and have used quite a bit of the resources. We have a production guide that we call The Low Impact Production Playbook. We also started a training program for all of our employees, which about 25 to 30%, have now gone through for sustainability fundamentals around sustainable business”.
Talking about their conversations with clients, both speakers had similar ways of presenting sustainability as both appealing and feasible. Katie said, “It’s how you operate internally, and having those open and honest conversations, sometimes calling a client out, at the beginning does open the door for future conversations. If your client has sustainability objectives, pull those up, and explain how a particular initiative could contribute to their overall goals”. Jenny added, “Budget is always a pain point for every single client, no matter what you're doing, and starting to zero in on what those pain points are for them, for example, with budget, you can talk about what kind of tax breaks or cost savings they would get from providing a sustainable production. Speaking about long term advantages to the benefits of sustainability and having a positive social impact. You want to approach clients where you're not shaming them for not being eco-conscious.”
The largest contribution to production pollution is air travel, which the conversation turned towards tackling. Jenny said that she’s seen agencies reducing air travel, saying, “I think COVID taught us a lot of good lessons. You don’t need to have 20 people traveling for a shoot. Clients are even opting out from attending shoots. Internally at agencies, creative teams aren’t sending as many people, primarily the decision-makers.” Katie added, “We try to limit 4-5 individuals being sent for a shoot – a producer, a creative director, an account person, a few team members. We’ve been talking internally about stipends to incentivize less travel. Writing different locations in scripts also allows less need for travel. We cut costs through less travel. How can we motivate people in agencies out of travel? This is a topic important for our discussions.” Other tips that were promoted were using data trackers/calculators, hiring sustainability consultants, and addressing the impact of data storage by developing a data plan and reducing cloud storage.
The meeting brought valuable sustainability methods and messaging to the fore, and provided insight for agencies and brands of the GTB community. Restating what cofounder Michael Kaliski said at the beginning of the meeting, “As the ecosystem of stakeholders who embrace the Green The Bid pledges, materials, resources, and ethos grows, it creates a shorthand between all production groups where we can all be more effective at integrating sustainability as standard practice.”
