Guardian Advertising has announced today that it is the first media company in the world to train its entire sales team to be certified Carbon Literate.
Being Carbon Literate means that all staff in the advertising team understand the carbon costs and impact of everyday activities and the ability to help reduce emissions on an individual, community and organisational basis.
The decision to train the team was driven by industry research highlighting a knowledge gap in climate change within advertising. For example, a recent study by the WFA and Kantar revealed that 35% of marketers reported a lack of knowledge and skills in sustainability, an increase from 20% in 2021.
As the leading global voice on the climate crisis, Guardian Advertising took the view that its staff, who are all in customer-facing roles, should be equipped with the skills to talk confidently about this issue and help find practical ways to address it.
The Guardian sustainability team created a bespoke course based on the Guardian’s award-winning climate journalism. The course is accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project, a UK charity helping inform and empower people globally to take action on the climate emergency.
At the end of the programme, staff committed to a series of individual and team actions, which are estimated to prevent up to 20,000kgs of CO2e emissions.
Following the training, Guardian Advertising has made three commitments:
Taking the Guardian’s Carbon Literacy workshop to the industry via its quarterly Agency Council update and regular meetings with key clients and agency partners
Implementing a new tool to measure campaign carbon emissions. This will help clients make informed choices about their media spend
Implementing AdGreen, an Ad Net Zero initiative to reduce emissions from advertising production - to strengthen the Guardian’s commitment to sustainable production practices in content partnerships.
As a result of the training, 97% of participants said they felt more knowledgeable about climate change and confident about identifying actions that will reduce their team’s carbon impact. Some 84% of participants now feel confident talking to clients and colleagues about the climate crisis (up from 28% before the workshop).
Phil Korbel, co-founder and director for external relations, Carbon Literacy, said:
“It’s brilliant to have the Guardian join the community of Carbon Literate employers. Their baseline of climate commitment was already high, but this demonstrates how a specialised course can build targeted capacity such as that of a sales team being better able to pitch their low carbon offer. The pledge to spread the training into their sector is just the sort of thing we love to see as Carbon Literacy becomes a norm in professional development. I look forward to seeing the next stage of the story as the Guardian thrives through its deployment of Carbon Literacy.”
Julie Richards, director of sustainability and operational transformation, Guardian Media Group, said:
“At the Guardian we made great progress over the last five years to cut our own company emissions by over 40%. As a global media organisation we also have the ability to make a much wider positive impact with readers and with the agencies and brands that we work with. Sustainability is part of everyone’s job and it has been fantastic to partner with our advertising team on this Carbon Literacy workshop.”
James Fleetham, director of advertising, Guardian Media Group, said:
“The climate crisis is the defining issue of our times. It’s an increasingly important conversation in advertising and that’s right, but we have a lot to learn. So I’m pleased we’ve been able to equip our team with the knowledge and confidence to talk about it with customers, using our world class reporting.”
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Notes for editors
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About the Guardian Media Group
Guardian Media Group is amongst the world’s leading media organisations. Its core business is Guardian News & Media (GNM), publisher of theguardian.com, one of the largest English-speaking quality news websites in the world.
In the UK, Guardian Media Group publishes the Guardian newspaper six days a week, first published in 1821. Since launching its US and Australian digital editions in 2011 and 2013, respectively, traffic from outside of the UK now represents around two-thirds of the Guardian’s total digital audience. The Guardian also has an international digital edition and a new European edition that launched in 2023.
