Brendan May outlines the radical shift the PR industry will need to make if it is to be a serious player in the sustainability world

A few years ago, writing in this magazine, I described public relations as the “klezmer at the wedding” when it came to sustainability. A klezmer is a traditional gypsy musician, who travels from one village to the next, picking up a bar mitzvah here and a wedding there.

I’m afraid my view has not changed, and recent accounts of PR firms taking money from less than democratic foreign regimes and the continued greenwashing of companies by agencies that should know better have if anything hardened my stance.

The marketing and communications world is almost unique for its lack of industry-wide basic sustainability standards or codes. For virtually every other sector there is at least some effort to create minimum best practice, but across PR and advertising you’ll struggle to find anything that comes close.

At a time when most multinational companies are reinventing their business models to adapt to a planet under strain, their PR advisers are not.

The problem is that this issue isn’t like trying to help clients understand how to use Twitter more effectively. This is about whether climate change will leave enough land for us to grow food to feed the world. It’s about whether rainforest destruction will remove the last natural carbon sinks we have and kill the biodiversity machinery that makes life on earth possible. If you don’t understand this, feel it and believe it, you won’t make a very good adviser.

Retailers, the consumer goods sector, extractive industries and the better banks are working round the clock to create business models that will help them survive and prosper in a new world. They are applying pressure on their suppliers to adapt, knowing that the environmental savings they pledge can only occur if the next level down the chain delivers.

The effort has mostly been focused on products and commodities so far. It has yet to reach the services sector, but it will do. And so, what should a multinational serious about sustainability look for in a communications agency?

Travel less

First, a robust and measurable environmental management system. One of the PR industry’s major environmental impacts comes from travel – some consultants hop on and off planes several times a week. A massive acceleration of video conferencing would allow both client and agency to save many tonnes of carbon and lots of money. If a client is trying to halve its environmental impact in the next ten years why would its communications providers not do the same?

Second, a communications agency should know what its direct carbon footprint is. If it doesn’t know, and isn’t able to prove it is reducing its emissions, it isn’t ready to play in the environment sector.

Third, if an agency’s answer to greenwashing major environmental offenders is that it does some nice pro bono work for a charity here or a green initiative there, that just won’t do any more. What is the point of helping a non-profit that is trying to stop environmental degradation at the same time as taking fat monthly retainers from a company that is impeding that effort? What is required of the modern agency is a clear and public set of policies and procedures that determine what business the firm will and won’t take, and what criteria and governance will determine commercial decisions.

Fourth, in the longer term, agencies will need to think about how the campaigns they devise affect the environment. If a marketing push promotes increased consumption of a product that is harmful to the planet, that footprint must be measured and compensated for. The marketing and communications industry should be thinking about the embedded footprint of their campaigns now. PR campaigns have a whole lifecycle, just like any other product.

The trade bodies that represent the communications industry have been woeful in grasping the issue. Every environmental journalist knows this, which is why they treat “green PR” with such disdain. Worse still, one of the biggest buyers of external communications agencies – government – has itself done nothing to push its suppliers on this agenda. Of the new voluntary lobbying codes floating about, none seems to prevent lobbying scandals and none concerns itself with environmental sustainability.

Just as the world’s biggest and boldest sustainability leaders have done, communications agencies need to get really serious about this agenda. The time will come when their customers insist on it.

Brendan May is founder of the Robertsbridge Group and a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation.
brendan.may@robertsbridgegroup.com
www.robertsbridgegroup.com