Maisie Lloyd
Maisie is the Digital Content Manager at Intelligency, handling all things creative for the agency. Her experience centres around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
Does the marketing industry negatively impact the planet?
As an industry, marketing is among the worst in terms of the negative impacts it has on the planet. Ranging from more obvious concerns like data farms emitting staggering emissions, to less obvious ones around consumerism.
The impacts, whilst varied, do exist and present several long-term issues when not properly managed.
What is corporate sustainability?
Corporate sustainability refers to the business strategies taken to ensure a business’s ethical impacts don’t negatively impact their staff, environment or economy. The key point of focus for most businesses is:
- Environmental
- Cultural
- Economic
- Social
Integrated practices help to protect and preserve these pillars of sustainability. The added benefits of introducing sustainable practices include:
Having a real-time positive impact within your immediate community. Reputationally, brands that demonstrate being sustainable can build trust with customers, stakeholders, investors, and staff.
Taking on a proactive approach contributes towards reducing risks. Whether that be preventing climate change from worsening, or forging the path to long-term economic growth, without compromising the environment.
An advantage of adopting sustainability efforts is the positive financial impacts it can have, both for cost-efficiency and for increasing revenue. For instance, environmental sustainability often leads to businesses becoming more efficient with resources, using only what is needed, and reducing operational costs.
What sustainability practices can marketers adopt?
There are several practices businesses can select from to improve their sustainability efforts.
Some of the smaller, easier-to-implement strategies include walk-to-work days, carpooling policies, and producing digital-first content. Whilst some of the higher-impact, more complex strategies include things like trading or recycling schemes or switching to eco-friendly packaging.
Some of the additional approaches to being a sustainable marketing brand are:
- Using eco-friendly web servers
- Carbon footprint tracking
- Going paperless
- Partnering with influencers or organisations with sustainable practices
- Transparency around efforts
Sustainability in marketing isn’t a trend or a box to tick. It is a responsibility. As an industry built on influence, marketers have a unique opportunity to shape not just consumer behaviour, but the future of our planet. Every campaign, platform, and partnership is a chance to make more conscious choices.
Earth Day serves as a reminder, but meaningful change happens in the everyday decisions we make as professionals. By embedding sustainability into our strategies, whether through small operational shifts or larger structural changes, we can reduce harm while building stronger, more trusted brands.
The question is not whether marketing can be sustainable. It is whether we are willing to lead that change.
Our Sustainability initiatives
It’s important to us that our environmental impact is little to non-existent. Which is why we’ve taken a look at our operations and found ways to ensure our carbon emissions are offset.
Going Paperless: One of the key decisions we’ve taken is to go paperless. We’ve eliminated printing and digitised our documents and opted for cloud storage for instant access from any location.
We utilise notebooks for meetings, which we will offset future purchases of notebooks with sustainable contributions to ensure we’re carbon neutral.
Work From Home Days: Our hybrid working model enables employees to work from home, reducing commuting and significantly lowering our overall carbon footprint.
Digital Clean-up: We also take steps to reduce our digital environmental impact. On the last Friday of each month, we carry out a “digital clean-up,” removing unnecessary emails and large attachments to reduce server load. As digital storage contributes to carbon emissions, this regular practice helps keep our systems efficient and environmentally responsible.
What we’re working towards
We are continuing to evolve our sustainability strategy. One of the next steps is introducing a quarterly green tech audit.
This will involve regularly reviewing our website performance and software stack, enabling us to prioritise energy-efficient tools without compromising the quality of our work. Sustainability starts with small, consistent actions. By making more conscious choices every day, we can reduce our impact and contribute to a more responsible future for our industry and our planet.
