Nov 11, 2025
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
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