Can Canadian innovation change the world? In today's episode, Alison Simpson interviews Mark Mandato, Senior Manager of Key Growth Initiatives at CBC, and Chris Sewell, CEO & Founder of Net Zero Media. With advertising emissions approaching 4% of global emissions—rivalling the entire aviation industry—and 74% of Canadians factoring sustainability into their purchasing decisions, this partnership is pioneering breakthrough measurement technology. Discover how CBC and Net Zero Media are giving marketers the precise data they need to track their campaigns' carbon impact and make informed decisions that benefit both their bottom line and the planet.

Presenter 0:01 Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's Marketing Podcast where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMA CEO, Alison Simpson,

Alison 0:25 The advertising industry accounts for as much as 2% of global carbon emissions from digital alone, with total advertising approaching 4% of all global emissions. That actually rivals the entire aviation industry. But here's what is particularly relevant for us as Canadian marketers. 74% of Canadians consider sustainability important when making purchasing decisions, and two thirds say they're willing to pay above average prices for products that have a lower carbon footprint. Plus 70% of TSX 60 companies have already committed to net zero emissions by 2050. Canadian marketers are sitting at a pivotal moment and navigating both unprecedented consumer expectations as well as evolving compliance requirements. This can create both opportunity and urgency for our profession. While consumer demand accelerates and regulatory frameworks tighten, we're seeing genuine innovation emerge right here at home. Today, we're exploring how Canadian innovation is setting new global benchmarks for environmental responsibility in advertising. CBC is pioneering sustainable media practices that are best in class, not just in Canada but globally. With the breakthrough measurement technologies that are giving marketers the precise, actionable data that they need to track their campaign's carbon impact. Today, I'm joined by Mark Mandato, who is Senior Manager of Growth Initiatives for the CBC. At the CBC, he is leading initiatives to position Canada's national broadcaster as a sustainability leader in Media Solutions. Mark's background spans Rogers Communications and Media Propulsion Laboratory, and he brings a unique commercial perspective to CBC's groundbreaking environmental programs. I'm also joined by Chris Sewell, the Head of Research and Co-founder of Net Zero Media. Chris is the technical architect behind carbon measurement methodologies that are revolutionizing how we understand advertising's environmental impact. Since developing his world leading methodology for quantifying carbon emissions and media activities back in 2007, Chris has worked with leading global brands, proving that sustainability and marketing effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. So welcome Chris and Mark. I am absolutely thrilled to have you both with me today, and I'm looking forward to diving into this conversation that matters more than ever for Canadian marketers.

Mark 2:45 Thank you. Great to be here.

Chris 2:47 Good to be here.

Alison 3:14 So Mark,let's start with the fundamental question. Given everything else that's competing for marketers' attention right now, whether it's AI, tariffs, economic pressures, why should sustainability be a priority for marketing and media professionals?

Mark 3:02 Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question to start off with. I think, I think it's gone from being a nice to have in a marketer's, you know, repertoire of things they have to worry about, down to an essential business imperative. Right? So it affects your brand's reputation, it can affect the consumer behaviour and even financial performance. So you had briefly mentioned that as of today, I think there's 301 companies that have signed on for the, you know, the net carbon zero for 2050, and it's appearing in annual reports as something that they are reporting against on a go forward basis.

Mark 3:32 So at one point it was like, yes, it was a nice thing to do because it was a right thing to do for the planet, but now it has actual business impact that's related to the marketing department. So that's why sustainability has to come back onto the radar. It's not going away. It's not something that's going to get sort of better on its own. So having the ability to report on a granular level is becoming more and more important for marketers.

Alison 3:54 That's great to hear. It's obviously mission critical from a planet perspective, but to see the business impact, to see the customer demand and increase the expectation, and now to have an ability to actually track it, is everything coming together, you know, the way it's meant to. Chris, you've been measuring advertising's carbon impact for over a decade. So for companies that are already tracking campaign metrics, why is carbon measurement important, and why does it matter for their bottom line?

Chris 4:23 Actually, Alison, it's getting on for two decades, which I suppose shows both my commitment and my stubbornness in this area. Yeah, the importance of carbon measurement is often overlooked by the marketing team as they are busily focused on existing business objectives, which as we know today, are getting m ore and more challenging. The carbon emanating from the marketing budget is being measured and reported today. It's just being managed by other parts of the organization, so there's not necessarily a clear line of sight, and there's two reasons this has been done and how it affects the bottom line. As Mark was saying, 70% of TSX companies are actually have net zero targets, and therefore someone has to be measuring what's occurring today.

Chris 5:10 So there's two reasons why this is important. Obviously, to meet those targets, but also how it affects the bottom line. Firstly, these companies who are talking about targets, are legally compelled to understand and report future business prospects. So this is a business, it's got nothing to do with climate at the moment, but, climate change is there as a reality. Therefore they have to take this into account when they're saying what's going to happen in the future. So this requires analysis of the external risks that are going to occur in future years, and the current emissions from the area of the business that's occurring today, which includes the marketing spend.

Chris 5:50 So market emissions are being measured and reported using what's called, currently is a spend based method. This is where each dollar spent on marketing, regardless of what channel or the activity, is converted into a carbon equivalent based on the local market factor. So it's a simple thing. I spend $100, we convert it by that factor, that's how much carbon on the site, regardless of what's actually occurring. It's a flat number. Everything is actually counted the same. So while this covers any internal or external legal or voluntary portion requirements that these companies are using, it does nothing to help understand the carbon intensity areas of spend. As I said, every dollar is given the same carbon value, and that's just not true.

Chris 6:37 Different channels, different activities, actually have different carbon intensity, and that method will not work in the future. So if it's not understood, it can't be managed. So the only way to reduce emissions is to reduce the budget, which I'm sure no marketer would want to hear that, if we're going to reduce emissions, because we have this target, therefore we will spend less on marketing. So it's not a great position to be in where we currently sit. So while this first reasoned about future risk, it is often the current cost with a direct link to the bottom line. Companies with net zero targets in a number of jurisdictions are neutralizing emissions. This might be an internal policy or maybe legislated requirement. If these marketing emissions are unable to be understood with no pathway to reduction, this cost will only increase with time, as budgets increase, and the cost of compensation or offsets is rising steadily all the time, because more and more companies are looking for, let's call it an easy way out. So marketers are increasing long term liability cost beyond the simple line items of the budget. This will be addressed again by business decisions outside the marketing department, and it's a greater understanding and action is taken. And what CBC is doing is that first major step for an organization to help marketers and the corporate clients understand in detail and they will start reducing into the future.

Alison 8:07 Thanks, Chris, that's super helpful. So we have Canadian consumers who absolutely increasingly expect businesses and brands to be paying attention to sustainability and climate change. We have businesses that are stepping up as they should, to also protect climate change and the challenges that's being measured in that sounds like quite a simplistic way that ultimately could reduce marketers budget. So to have a more sophisticated way to measure it is in the best interest of marketers or budgets the business and ultimately, Canadian consumers as well. Mark, I know the CBC has a real commitment to responsible media and sustainability. I'd love you to walk us through your "Greening Our Story" strategy, and share how sustainable media initiative is fitting in the broader CBC commercial strategy.

Mark 8:58 Yeah, absolutely, the sustainability portion and the "Greening Our Story" lives under a larger umbrella that we call Responsible Media. So CBC, as a Crown Corporation, has set a stake in the ground to lead from the front, as we say, in terms of responsible media. And that includes everything from the "Greening Our Story", which is the sustainability piece, to our DEI initiatives, to indigenous initiatives, all the different things that make CBC the gem that it is. But from a sustainability standpoint, there isn't currently a Canadian standard that speaks to the Scope 3 emissions, which are the ones sort of downstream effect of advertising.

Mark 9:35 So because there's not a Canadian standard in place, as part of "Greening Our Story", we already were doing emission reporting and sustainability work on the production end of things. So when CBC produces a show or is involved in production, there's a set of guidelines that oversee carbon emissions for that. But after that fact, once the shows are produced and once advertising comes into the picture, there hasn't been that carbon calculator or that attention paid to what that carbon draw is. So that's really why we've decided to partner with Net Zero Media. We decided to approach it from a very academic standpoint.

Mark 10:08 And again, the term that kept coming up over and over again in our steer codes was it was important to lead from the front. It was important to get out in front of this, to educate the marketers, to educate the industry about the effects of carbon in terms of what is produced from advertising. And get to that granular nature where we're actually looking at every step of the way, from when an ad is sent to CBC to go to air, through transmission, through to it appearing on a screen somewhere, at each stage, there is a carbon cost. So the idea of the carbon calculator was, we were going to work with Net Zero Media. They were going to do the heavy lifting and the math. We were going to be able to input clients' campaigns, and basically, with the click of a button, output what that carbon draw was, right?

Mark 10:56 And it's a bit of an abstract thinking, like, if you think of carbon emissions for a large corporation, you think of things like converting gas powered vehicles to electric, or putting solar panels up on the transmission stations. Like there are things that people think about, and they're like, Yeah, that's going to help with sustainability. But you don't really think about a display ad, for example, being transmitted through a number of different computers, through to a trafficking computer, through to a transmission and then lighting up on someone's cell phone, right? Each of those stages along the way is a little bit of carbon, a little bit of carbon, a little bit of carbon.

Mark 11:31 And when you add it all up, like you said, the advertising industry is the same as the aviation industry in terms of what its cost is, in terms of a total carbon draw. So Chris hit the nail on the head for marketers, you really can't make data-informed decisions about your business without having that level of granularity. It can't be a one-to-one spend base. It has to be based on activity. So the whole sustainability work that went into the carbon calculator was based on the idea that we need to have that level of granularity to provide our marketers with data and really that that's what it is. It's a data point which allows them to then make business decisions going forward.

Mark 12:08 It wasn't something where we built this necessarily to be prescriptive, where we're going to advertisers and we're saying, Hey, we looked at your last five campaigns, you should really be buying more of this and less of this, or you should be using this channel or this channel. It's not for us to be prescriptive. It's really for us to educate them on what that carbon cost is, or that carbon draw is, by platform, by vertical, by campaign, and then we can have discussions, and they can have discussions internally about what they do with that data.

Alison 12:38 It's such an important education. I've been on the agency side and also on the CMO side earlier in my career, and I had never had an appreciation for the potential positive and negative impact that our profession can have on greening the planet and on sustainability. So the fact that we actually rival the aviation industry is a mind blowing stat for me when I was doing some research.

Mark 13:01 And Alison, that sort of abstract discussions we've had in the meetings we had with people who were working on the project with us, were trying to understand how, for example, a 60-second TV spot draws more carbon than a 30-second TV spot. And then you start to think about it, and you say, well, the screen is going to light up for twice as long, and when your TV is lit up for twice as long, it's drawing twice as much energy, and that energy has a cost associated to it, right? So it is an abstract thing to think that TV commercials are, you know, as damaging as a diesel engine or they're 1000 or 10,000 impressions on a web page is the same as planting a tree. Like there's literally carbon draws with everything you do when you start to look at it en masse, in terms of the billions of impressions that are served and the millions of TV ads, it really does add up.

Alison 13:45 The good news is now we can actually track that and then put solutions in place.

Mark 13:50 Exactly.

Alison 13:51 So you're the first in Canada to do this. I know it's early days. Are you seeing it become a competitive differentiator with advertisers?

Mark 13:59 Currently, it's not. Again, we're not at a stage where this has become something that we did, or we started to do, to make it a differentiator in our market, to say, hold up the flag and say, Look what CBC is doing. You should buy us instead of the other guys, because they're not doing it. That's not what the project was for. The project was to put a stake in the ground, to educate the industry, to, again, show that this is an important thing to look at and going forward, we want to share this with all of our other competitors and friends and CO vendors in the space and partners that we work with, and marketers to say this is something we should be looking at and providing this tool is the first step, because you really can't make changes without that data point. If you can't measure it, you can't have a downstream effect, right?

Mark 14:43 So, so it's early stages. It's an education. We're in the sort of rollout education stage with this, with the hope that other people then call us, whether through their agency, through their marketing partners, other people in the industry, and say, Hey, I like what you're doing with that carbon IQ, the carbon calculator. Is that something we could look at? And we're more than happy and willing to share all of our learnings. It's not something we're keeping close to the vest as CBC as a business differentiator. It's a decision we made because it was the right thing to do.

Alison 15:11 That's great. Thank you for being open to sharing the learning, not just with our audience, but with ultimately, the broader marketing profession as well.

Mark 15:18 Yes, 100%.

Alison 15:19 Now, Chris, I know CBC are the first Canadian broadcaster to adopt your carbon calculator. So can you share how your carbon IQ platform really complements CBC production-focused measurements when it comes to advertising spend and media planning?

Chris 15:32 Yeah, I suppose the first thing, again, Mark's explained that very well, and it is a complicated thing to get your head around, that CBC have been doing for a number of years, great stuff on looking at the emissions from the production of the programs and also the whole corporate emissions. And that reporting has been ongoing, and it's excellent, but this this big part of the business that was actually selling space for corporates to buy that real estate and actually create those emissions. Now, were they CBC's responsibility? I would argue, not necessarily, that there would be no ads if no one bought them.

Chris 16:13 Therefore it's the advertisers responsibility, but they had no mechanism for actually giving that in a compliant manner, hence the engagement with us to actually build the carbon IQ so that they can do two things. One would be to understand where the emissions are going on all these 1000s of ad products that CBC have through TV and their digital platforms so they could understand it themselves. So there was some knowledge to actually start to improve. Is there anything we can do to make this a greener platform? And the second thing was, these companies who are buying these advertising space or this real estate that's actually sitting there, what are the emissions that they're responsible? What are their scope 3 emissions that actually CBC are generating on their behalf. How can we give those give that in a really simple manner?

Chris 17:10 Can we report that and give that across so they can use it in their reporting and improve the way they engage with CBC being the first, but with all companies. So that's much better than using the method they were actually using before. So we actually come on board, as Mark said, as an expert view on where emissions are occurring across order advertising products in all their channels. Therefore, CBC are the first broadcaster, not only really in Canada, but globally, some companies are saying they've done this, but they're not doing it with this rigour and transparency and, importantly, independence.

Chris 17:46 We are we are completely independent of the process. We don't buy advertising. We just create a platform with science- based methodology to enable this to actually be done. One of the most important things about what CBC are doing, there's a lot of people actually do report, but they're doing it in real time. So this is before anything occurs, therefore there's actually an opportunity to engage and actually do something about these emissions. I think that's one of the keys that will become clearer as this rolls out and the communication improves. It's before the advertising occurs, we can see what's about to occur and possibly do something about it, if that's what the customer wants to do.

Alison 18:29 Thanks, Chris, that's a super helpful overview. So at this stage in the conversation, I have no doubt our listeners are intrigued, because there's business reasons to do this, there's consumer reasons to do this, and it's the right thing to do. So Mark, help us now understand the practical implementation. I know in our earlier conversation, you said there's no additional cost or time required for advertisers. So what does that actually look like in practice?

Mark 18:54 Yeah, we've we've sort of engineered it from the beginning to be as low-touch for the marketers and advertisers as possible. Two areas of business that we, our advertising falls into, either direct, or, we'll call it direct, IO or programmatic. So on the programmatic side of things, we've done a lot of homework with a company called Scope 3 to do what's called supply path optimization. We've reduced the number of DSPs we deal with and the number of jumps that an ad needs to make before it gets to the digital space and programmatic. And in doing that, we've sort of reduced our overall emissions in terms of programmatic supply paths. So on that side, it's sort of no touch. And on the direct IO side, we would work with clients. It's as simple as them contacting us and saying, We've run a campaign with you. We'd like to look at what the carbon IQ tells us.

Mark 19:37 We take their booking sheet, their insertion order, as it's known in the industry. We plug that data into the carbon calculator. We get it, we generate a report that has all of their carbon output broken out by platform or by vertical so what was it in digital advertising? What was it in connected TV? What was it with linear television? Whatever they had bought from the CBC, it generates that report, and we would go and review that with them as a key output, either at quarterly business reviews at, you know, the reps would would handle a lot of that work and going back and forth, and again, we provide it sort of, I don't want to say open ended.

Mark 20:11 It has insights, but not prescriptive. So we would say this is what we've learned. Here are some comparisons. Just so you know, your last campaign that ran with us for the month of July had these five different components to it. It had some TV, it had some connected TV and streaming service, and it had some digital audio. The value, or the carbon equivalency, would have been 30 flights between Vancouver and Toronto. So if you wanted to compare that to something else that you're doing, where you're making cutbacks in other areas, this is what your media was worth. So really, it's giving them a value that they can then either campaign over campaign, or, like I said, usually through quarterly business reviews to say what has been our impact, and what could we be doing to change some of these, these outputs, right?

Mark 20:54 And then we have discussions with them, kind of about the levers behind the scenes, like things that affect that number are, for example, country to country, one of the effects on the numbers, where's the energy coming from? Is it solar? Is it wind? Is it hydroelectric? Is it nuclear? An advertiser can't control that lever, right? However, the breakouts that they have by vertical and the amount that they've spent can be reported on. Now that doesn't necessarily take into account the efficiency of each of the platforms. So TV, linear TV, for example, may be a much larger carbon draw than a streaming service might be. However, TV has given you a different reach than the streaming service has, and it's been used for a different purpose in your marketing mix.

Mark 21:36 So it's not just this carbon good, this carbon bad. There's no way of looking at it that way without building in the efficacy of each of those platforms and the efficiency and what you spent on it, and the efficiency and everything else, right? So in the marketing mix, that carbon draw is one piece of data that will help you, over time, to look at what you're doing, and then eventually, down the road, if you have an ESG or some sort of a carbon reduction strategy, you have the data points to work from, instead of just drawing it back to an overall marketing budget.

Mark 22:07 So if your company has said we've reduced airline travel for everyone by two flights a year, because we know this is what it costs us in terms of carbon offsets, let's say. Well now you can do the same with your marketing spend and say this was the carbon cost, not the dollar cost, but the carbon cost of running these campaigns. Where does that fit into our overall sustainability strategy? And again, by having that, we're hoping to lead people down that path of education to say it does have an impact. It is important. It's something you can look at.

Alison 22:38 And to your point, it's so important. Anything we're doing around marketing is really about building brand and delivering business results. So it's mission critical that we really look at this as an important consideration and a trade off, without saying that we're going to replace the critical need to build business and contribute to Canada's economy.

Mark 22:57 100%. There's, there's no, there's no situation where it's like, you really don't want this carbon, don't buy the ads. You can't not buy the ads. It's more thinking about it differently to say, what is the effect of these and where does it fit into my larger marketing budget?

Alison 23:10 Now, given that this is quite new in Canada, I can only imagine some of like the shock value, as you and your team are sharing the carbon impact of the campaigns with different media teams and agencies and brands. How have they reacted?

Mark 23:23 Many agencies, or lots of the agencies that we talked to in building out what the carbon calculator needed to do, have their own either global sort of corporate emissions, like large multinationals already have some of these things built in, and our tool is looking specifically at the Canadian marketplace to draw some of those parallels. So one of our first projects is really to go out when we roll this out, and say to the agencies that already have potentially internal carbon calculators that they're using globally, and say, you give us your number, we'll look at our number.

Mark 23:51 Let's look at where it matches or it doesn't match, and build that standard. You know, you buy television against Numeris or you buy radio, you know, against all these different things that have been in the market a long time in terms of a currency, there is no actual measurement currency that's standardized for the Canadian media industry. So part of this work may be to help roll that out in conjunction with our agency partners. We haven't really rolled it out enough yet to have any shock factors that I can tell you about. You know, most agencies now have somebody that's responsible solely for sustainability and the clients as well. And we're looking forward to going up to the market with this and having this and having those discussions.

Alison 24:08 It's great to hear the progress that we're making from a Canadian perspective. Now it is still clearly in the nascent stages in Canada as well. So I'd love you both to share what you're seeing internationally as far as which markets or brands are really leading the way and what best practices are starting to emerge.

Chris 24:40 Having worked on this project for getting on for two years from start to finish, the language is talking about carbon, is talking about the challenges is there, and it's not the only thing we'll be looking at. And that's exactly where everyone needs to get to. Unfortunately, from me being a bit of a cynic here, there's a lot of brands making claims about how they're reducing emissions, but I can't see any evidence for these claims anywhere. They don't actually share that information, where it's going to be good that the work that's being done at the moment is going to be shared, which increases everyone's knowledge and hopefully gives them confidence to share this knowledge.

Chris 25:21 So I'll give you a couple of examples. I'll give you a couple in Australia, which I think has been doing some pretty good work. So for three years, we've been working with a leading superannuation fund manager, which is a pension fund. They've been able to achieve, for the last two years, reductions in their emissions because they've worked with their agency and said this is important to us. It's actually we want a carbon budget was as well as a financial budget. So although the actual budget and the marketing spend has gone up, the actual emissions have come down. The theory has changed slightly. The mix of the way they were buying their channels and sub channels to make this actually come down a bit. And there were some simple things they could do.

Chris 26:05 So that's that's a great success story, I think, and it's achieved, that's actually given that corporate lower reportable emissions, which is one of the things they want to do. And there's another one which is, and Mark did touch on this, the things that needs to be looked at when we start to include carbon. There's another financial corporation that we actually work with, and they've been able to demonstrate the importance of TV. Because people say, Oh, digital, we can do this stuff, and it's low emissions. But TV actually on the cost of carbon per 1000 views, clicks, whatever the metric is, was actually showing a lower amount of emissions, therefore they could again slightly change their buying patterns to give lower emissions, which again was not affecting the business outcome.

Chris 26:50 They were still selling their goods, services, whatever, in the same manner that they were trying to do, but they had a lower carbon actually response for that. None of that stuff could have happened unless they could see the detail that was actually going on from a carbon point of view, and again, I think importantly, from an independent point of view as well. We weren't involved in the buying or planning. We were just measuring what was occurring and making suggestions and giving that knowledge across to the parties who were buying and planning to make more informed decisions.

Mark 27:22 I was actually earlier this week, on a call with the European sort of governing body of all the different broadcasters in Europe that got together under an umbrella organization called egta. And the the interesting thing is, I would say a lot of the European countries are maybe a year to a year and a half ahead of where Canada is in terms of doing some of this groundwork. Like TF1 in France, for example, we've looked at a lot of their research to help build out some of our strategies in terms of what we think is a good message to the market. Channel Four in the UK, for example, was doing a study similar to what Chris was just saying with Vodafone, one of the large wireless carriers in the UK that was looking at that carbon per impression.

Mark 28:06 So they were literally taking the dollar and working it back from a carbon number to say the whole number isn't really what you need to look at all the time. It's how much am I spending on it versus that number and attributing it down to a value. So they're actually doing some of that legwork now to try to show not all sort of media channels are equal, which we know in terms of our spend as marketers, and, you know, the money we spend, but also what is the impact. So it was interesting to say they were concerned that they were going to go out as Channel Four in the UK and say, This is what TV does, and that buyers would start to take TV off the buy because it was harming the environment more than their digital people were, right?

Mark 28:43 And that wasn't the actual case, because when you actually look at what you spend on TV and what you get in return, the carbon per impression or the carbon per impact was much less than it was for digital, or in the same ballpark. So it's really interesting work that's being done. We are, again, probably a year and a half to two years behind some of the things they're doing in Europe, but it's interesting. Doing this sort of work has got us a seat at the table, so to speak, to have conversations with those large players and a lot of information exchange as well. And the number one thing they said to us in terms of a challenge is actually educating the industry. That education piece is key, and that's a large component of it.

Chris 29:21 Mark's right. The work CBC have been doing, we've been talking about a white paper, which will be published shortly. And everyone I've spoken to around Europe, all keen to actually get their hands on that, which is the roadmap, which would better be shared. They've, obviously, there's some good work being done there, but they're also keen on seeing this work that's being done because it is a big body of work, I would argue it's, it's one of the biggest projects that's actually been done from loads ago, and it's sitting in Canada, which is great.

Alison 29:57 That's amazing to hear. I know not just our listeners, but the CMA membership will be very interested in that. So Mark, when it's ready to share, let me know. We'll be happy to broadcast that with our members as well. So you shared some of the challenges. Obviously, the benefits are very clear. Implementation always presents some challenges, the first challenge being education. So what other challenges are you seeing in the Canadian market?

Mark 30:20 I mean, the only thing, and I sort of alluded to it earlier, is that there's not a standard. If there was a standard currency that everybody was working towards, then you could take the calculator and extrapolate it out to all the different vendors and brands and say, This is what it's going to be. But as we're developing that standard, that's going to be a challenge. The other challenge we face in this moment, and you alluded to it off the top is when times are good and everybody's making lots of money and budgets are fat, people have time for ESG and sustainability. And as things tighten, tighten, tighten down, and people are worried about making their next quarter or their next annual look good, the pendulum can swing away from this to be frank, right?

Mark 30:58 So I don't think it's ever going away, but we're facing a time whereas people are worried about tariffs and, you know, cutbacks and other things like that, having to spend time and energy on sustainability is a challenge, but it's not a challenge that we sort of shy away from, or it's something we don't think we should push forward on. It's a long term play, and it may take us some time to get to see everybody we want to see and have those discussions, because other things have bubbled to the surface, let's say.

Alison 31:24 And ultimately, the true goal standard would be if brands could see them for improved campaign performance alongside reducing that carbon footprint. And the only way that goal is to be able to understand it first and then measure it and see the impact it is having. Now I really appreciate the time you both have given today, I always end each episode by asking my guests to share a piece of career advice.

Alison 31:46 Given the sustainability imperative that we've talked about today, I'm going to switch it up a little bit for the two of you and ask what's your key recommendation for our listeners who are planning their 2026 strategies and want to take a step towards reducing advertising carbon footprint.

Mark 32:04 Yeah, in terms of advice, the one thing I would say is, once you go down the path of learning about this, it's not as daunting as it looks. The work that Chris did and his team, incredibly complex. The math behind it, science behind it, incredibly complex. But the readings that we did to bring ourselves up to speed on this opened up a whole new way of thinking about it, right? So if you're a marketer who this is on your radar at all, and your team is being asked about this at all, I would say, do the reading, just go online, find reputable sources, like anything. The education piece on this is farther behind other markets, so it presents a great opportunity for you to become the team's expert or the subject matter expert on this by doing the reading and listening to the podcast and diving into it. It is actually a really interesting area of science and a really interesting area of commerce, and where those two intersect.

Alison 32:51 Thanks, Mark. And would it be, would it be safe to offer up that they can reach out to you for anyone that's interested in learning more?

Mark 32:58 100%. I won't be the resource, but I'll have the links to send them for the resources. I'm going to throw it out there just as a side plug is, there's a podcast and a web page or a substack called People versus Algorithms. The gentlemen on there, there's three guys who have been in the industry for years and years, who have the most fascinating conversations about everything around sustainability, all the way through AI, all the way through to media. People versus Algorithms, I'll give it a plug. I don't work with these people or anything, but when I started diving into it, everything I read on there was just absolutely fascinating.

Alison 33:29 I listen to podcasts on my morning runs, so that's going to be joining me on my morning run tomorrow.

Mark 33:33 People versus Algorithms. There you go.

Alison 33:35 And Chris, what advice would you share?

Chris 33:36 I would introduce carbon intensity into the valuation or planning process of buying media. And it needs to be weighted, but that can be low to start with, it's not going to actually sway the decision making process. It should just be set in, say, 2% move it to 5% of the against current metrics, and it could increase over time as your confidence grows, as you get more information around this, it will become clearer that it doesn't actually affect business, because I think that's one of the things, or low carbon business, it doesn't. So therefore, start doing it, start understanding it. And I strongly believe it should be independent the buying process. The only place where this accurate and compliant measurement can take place is with media owners like CBC and the other media owners, because they have all the necessary data points to calculate the emissions correctly.

Alison 34:29 So a huge thank you, Mark and Chris, for joining us today. Chris, especially joining us all the way from Australia, I know the time change was a little challenging to manage around, but a really important conversation and a really insightful conversation. So a huge thank you to you both.

Mark 34:43 My pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Chris 34:45 Thank you.

Presenter 34:51 Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit theCMA.ca and sign up for your free MyCMA account, it's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership, news and industry trends.