Mastering the Campaign Ad Net Zero Awards

We held our first Campaign Ad Net Zero Awards masterclass on Tuesday 7 March.

The masterclass took participants through November’s winning campaigns and helped prepare them for this year’s entries, opening in April. It focused on the criteria used to judge the Ad Net Zero Awards, highlighting the five-point sustainability action plan at the heart of it.

Featuring a panel discussion from Seb Munden, Chair of Ad Net Zero; Gideon Spanier, Editor in Chief, Campaign UK; Julia Ramsay, Director, Supply Chain Risk and Resilience, PwC; and Isabelle Quevilly, Director Creative Shop UK, Meta, the masterclass also offered supporters the opportunity to ask questions about making a stand-out entry.

Top tips included:

• Look at the five-step Ad Net Zero Action Plan. If you are daunted by the entry process, then it is worth checking your entry against the five pillars, which will address how the ad is made but also the behaviour change message that should accompany your campaign, as well as demonstrating real commitment from your organisation towards net zero goals.
• Show evidence. How are you driving behaviour change and reducing carbon? The awards entry needs to show impact in your outcomes as well. Think about how you can demonstrate scalable outcomes in consumer behaviour change.
• Consider how you are taking steps to avoid greenwashing. Use the entry to showcase what the internal process was to ensure your creative and marketing messages avoided making misleading environmental claims. Look to the ASA and CMA for their rules on this and don’t forget to consider the full lifecycle of the product.
• Make sustainability feel everyday. Every job is a climate job today. You don’t need to have sustainability in your job title to be doing this work. Thinking about the multi-faceted motivations of the Hellmann’s ‘Cook Clever, Waste Less’ Grand Prix winner last year, which aimed to reduce food waste but also helped combat the cost-of-living crisis. The main motivation may not be sustainability, but if the impact is a massive reduction in greenhouse gases, then this is also worthy.
• Finally, ask yourself, is your business ready to enter the awards? If not, use the incentive of these awards to think about how you can change how you do business. Not every company will have work that is ready for the Campaign Ad Net Zero Awards. If advertising is going to promote unsustainable behaviour, then these awards aren’t for you.

Entries for the awards will open in April and you can head to campaignadnetzeroawards.com for further details.

Catch up on a recording of the masterclass here.