Get Ready for the Carbon Quote
The day may come when clients will weigh how and where to shoot TVCs based on how much pollution they generate. BBDO's Steffen Gentis thinks that day is here.
BBDO Germany Takes Lead in Establishing Guidelines
for Carbon Emissions in TVC Production
The day may come when clients will weigh how and where to shoot based on
how much pollution they generate. Steffen Gentis thinks that day is here.
By Anthony Vagnoni
There's a price to pay for everything, it seems, and BBDO Dusseldorf's Steffen Gentis believes that agencies, production companies and clients should be aware of the price in carbon emissions when it comes to producing advertising content.
In an era when global marketers are increasingly concerned with the environment and issues of sustainability-a concern that's working its way down their supply chains to impact all kinds of vendors and partner companies - Gentis, Head of Production for Proximity BBDO in Germany, has launched an aggressive initiative to estimate the amount of CO2 generated by TV commercial production.
Working with a wide-ranging group of consultants, experts and production executives, Gentis has helped develop a format for production companies to estimate the carbon output of producing individual jobs based on the demands of the script for things such as travel, location production, use of helicopters, power generation and more. The formula takes into account a wide range of factors, including things like the general carbon impact of electricity generation in different countries where production might be taking place.
The effort is detailed in an expansive and provocative white paper the agency has published online called the Carbon Film Quote. It can be found at www.carbonproductionquote.com.
The site describes the effort this way: "Carbon Film Quote is the world's first TV commercial budget estimator with an integrated carbon calculator. This lets you identify and evaluate low-emission, environmentally-friendly production options when looking at initial cost estimates."
Its mantra is simple, it adds: "What you measure, you will manage."
Gentis says that motivation for doing this is fairly obvious - agency clients have adopted their own corporate responsibility programs, and in many instances it includes targets to reduce carbon emissions. Even BBDO parent Omnicom has set its own goal, he says, to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions globally by 20 percent within the next five years.
"So of course for us this meant looking at ourselves and how we work," Gentis says, "and raising the question of what can we do?" Initially the agency began examining its own processes and workflows, and it immediately struck him that there was no easy and reliable way to estimate just how much greenhouse gas is produced as a result of shooting a job. "It seemed like a reasonable thing to look around and see if anyone else in the industry was trying to find ways to calculate CO2 for commercial shoots," he explains. "If there was such a tool, then perhaps we could adopt this for use among agencies and production houses in Germany."
He got the upper management of the BBDO office in Dusseldorf to agree to support his efforts, and set out researching the various carbon calculators available in the film business to see which might be best applied to the making of ads. Gentis and his team did an analysis of other efforts to gauge various green production guidelines for ads and TVCs as part of their process. This includes the AICP's "spot goes green" study along with those of the APA in London and the French "Ecopod" and efforts on the part of that country's energy agency, ADEME, to help producers get an idea of their environmental impact.
They studied other efforts in the UK, such as a study conducted with Starcom's Mediavest group, as well as the Center for Social Media of the American University in Washington, DC, and its Code of Best Practice for Sustainable Filming.
They also brought in Dadi van Eendenburg to help out. A veteran German executive producer who's now retired, he's developed an online software tool that can be used to calculate carbon emissions generated by commercial production. The program is called the Commercial Movie Calculator (www.cmc-home.eu) and a sample of the program is included on the Carbon Film Quote web site.
Van Eendenburg explains that the CMC was designed specifically to take the countless variables involved in your typical TVC production and assign predetermined carbon consumption values to them, taking into account a factor of energy efficiency based on where in the world you're working and what energy source you're using. "Oil, natural gas, solar, pellets-they all produce a different factor of CO2 generation," he explains.
The big hits in carbon generation for TVC production is travel, van Eendenburg points out. And the CMC tool doesn't take everything into account, such as set design and construction, which can vary widely based on the script, the location, etc. "This will never reflect the actual amount of energy being used on a production," he says, "as the reality will always be different. But it can give you a good idea going into the bid."
Gentis also retained an independent German research group called Thema1 to assist in the Carbon Film Quote white paper; they're a Berlin-based consulting firm that specializes in helping companies and organizations transform their processes to be more in line with sustainability guidelines.
"Our objectives were to develop a sense of transparency, efficiency and quality when it comes to estimating carbon impact of production," Gentis says.
What drove him to do this was a number of things, but one in particular played a key role: it's a film produced in Canada that features an engaging and charismatic scientist named David Suzuki. You can check out an interactive version of the film, called "The Test Tube," here.
In a nutshell, the film shows what's going to happen if the number of people on the planet keeps growing exponentially, using as an illustrative example a test tube filled with bacteria. "It motivated me to ask myself, 'What can I do, both as an individual and a professional?' And that got me to looking at our processes here in the agency," Gentis says. "The first thing we saw was that there was some low-hanging fruit that was easy to tackle."
The objectives of the Carbon Film Quote initiative are numerous. In addition to helping give the industry a way to measure carbon emissions, there are others, such as taking a leadership role for the agency in this movement, helping clients achieve a sense of transparency when managing carbon levels associated with the production of their ads and setting in motion a move towards more sustainable forms of production.
What's important about this effort, Gentis points out, is that it's being driven by specialists in commercial production who know the industry intimately. They understand the process by which jobs are bid and selections are made. "The whole idea was to arrive at a quote whereby producers can simply enter a few more numbers into their bids and get a fairly accurate read on the carbon footprint they might be generating," he says. "Then I can turn around and say to my client, who's paying for this job, 'Look, it might be 17,000 euros cheaper to shoot in Kiev, but it's going to cost you 17,000 more tons of CO2.' It's their call, but now we can make a more informed recommendation.
"It's basically looking at efficiency in a different way," Gentis continues. "We're offering the client the same product. There is no change in quality; they'd be working with the same director and the same production company. We're not making any kind of creative call. All we're saying is the Carbon Film Quote is a fairly good indicator of the use of energy anywhere. And if we can use less energy in creating the same product, we are more efficient."
Van Eendenburg, like Gentis, ties the consumption of CO2 with the great equalizer for all production ventures, money. "If you lower your carbon footprint, it always means you're saving money," he says. "The two are linked. If you cut the carbon, it just costs less. When you consider the impact on a global company like P&G, which shoots thousands of commercials around the world every year, it can add up."
Gentis says that the working version of the Carbon Film Quote formula was given to a select group of German production companies to test out earlier this year; the beta phase of this test will continue through this October, after which the agency would like to see all of its production companies use the Carbon Film Quote when submitting bids. In the meantime, Gentis says, they're feedback and recommendations and using them to refine future versions of the Carbon Film Quote process, hopefully arriving at something that the industry can adopt on a wider basis.
Once the agency has worked out the bugs in the carbon quote system for TV production, it will extend the initiative to include print production and digital production, Gentis adds, "so we're not just looking at one area here."
As part of this process, Gentis convened a meeting in early March of top German production company EPs from shops like Markenfilm and Neue Sentimental Film. Also in attendance was Manfred Vogelsänger of Vogelsänger Film, who is head of the German producer's association, Allianz Deutscher Produzenten, along with van Eendenburg of the Commercial Movie Calculator. Moderating the discussion was a journalist from the advertising and marketing publication Horizont.
"We brought all of these players to the table and discussed with them on how we can work together on this effort, and they immediately pointed out some things that would need a rethink on our part," he recalls. "And this is exactly what we wanted. Our goal was to create an awareness of this issue, as it's only through being aware of it can you effect any change."
Since that meeting Gentis has set up a Facebook page for the Carbon Film Quote, which you can find here. It's designed to help circulate information about the initiative and elicit industry response. So far, the reactions posted on the page are generally positive. "I think this is a bold move, and one that might be a good pitch winner considering that most international client organizations put more and more importance around their sustainability programs," posts UK-based production consultant Pat Murphy. "We work with clients that value this kind of thinking early enough in the pre-pro planning stages of production. It's a real added value, and we include it as an important part of our checklist."
There's also plenty of reaction to be found on the Carbon Film Quote site itself. Jörg Fudickar, Managing Director of Twin Film, says this: "We all know that buying energy-saving lamps or turning off the TV standby isn't nearly enough to avert the looming climate catastrophe. That's why it's so important to find ways of transferring our private ecological conscience into our daily professional lives. The great thing about this tool is that it will now allow TV commercial production companies to evaluate the economic criteria under which they operate in an ecological context." Gentis is reaching out to production houses outside Germany as well, including companies in the US such as The Ebeling Group.
Comments like this have to be gratifying to Gentis, who says there's more to this than just helping clients achieve sustainability goals and cut costs. "There's a personal side, too," he adds. "I have children, and I wonder what kind of planet we'll be leaving behind for them. At the same time, as the head of production, I'm able to recommend and identify the efficient processes for us to produce work. If doing so can help reduce energy consumption and cut CO2 emissions, then I can accomplish two things at one time."
Published 28 April, 2011
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