ESG ideas within the marketing procurement category

In the last blog post we had a whirlwind tour of all things ESG when it comes to Procurement. We know that it’s important to implement a robust procurement strategy (regardless of whether the output is to tick boxes or not) to enhance brand reputation, attract customers, mitigate risk, and build partnerships full of joint innovation. This is all great, but how do we implement these plans? I’m not sure there’s one clear or right answer and will for the most part be an approach that requires learning but, from a marketing procurement perspective here’s a high-level overview of my approach.

I like to start big and then fill in the details. My starting point is the elements that matter most to the organisation, internal stakeholders, external parters and anyone else that might be important. Areas that are crucial in my world are typically:

💡 Reduction & sustainable practise

💡Diversity & Inclusion

💡Modern slavery

Action: Year 1

• Identify my core agencies/suppliers based on spend, risk and potential (whether this is innovation, relationship, ability to support).
• Use a tool like EcoVardis, Sedex, Clarity AI or MSCI ESG Research to evaluate the current position of your chosen agencies or suppliers against your objectives and use your insight to form a baseline approach for measurement and success.
• Benchmark your baseline against industry standards and use this to set targets in collaboration with your chosen partners. This part is tricky across marketing because typically this is an area thought not to bring much from an ESG perspective – we’re not big hitters here for sure, but we can absolutely contribute to the overall impact in a meaningful way.

A great example of this would be for creative production and considering a way to record the impact in the following areas:

a) recycling or giving away backdrops to local performing arts companies or schools to remove the impact of dumping.

b) Asking the team to car share or use public transport where possible and calculate the emission difference per shoot.

c) Ordering food from a local small business to ensure money is filtered back into SME’s and that the delivery of the food doesn’t mean driving miles- which again ensures that the carbon impact can be calculated (make sure you include no plastic cutlery, plates or cups in your order) 

d) Become a pioneer of inclusion and diversity across teams that are being hired. Start a manifesto working internally and externally to encourage and support this. Start small but then go big, what areas need to be tackled? How do we join up and ensure we’re looking at upskilling ourselves on unconscious bias training. This manifesto can then form part of the RFP so that any new partners can understand and sign up to support your ESG ways or working.

e) Shoot locally to avoid air travel (We could also use CGI but the energy associated with this is vast and difficult to calculate so let’s maybe not try to tackle this in year 1). By working with the likes of ALBERT for example (Production Tools - albert (wearealbert.org) and your agencies/suppliers create a capture of your existing footprint and make a plan to reduce!

BOOM! A-E will now give you metrics for tracking production which can really help to showcase marketing as something other than fluffy ;)

• Supplier collaborations – making sure combined ESG plans, challenges and aspirations are included in my regular communications (ie. QBR’s) and SRM plans. Co-creation and transparency are so important because the overall ambition should always mean pulling n the same direction. Highlighting this in relevant meetings with the right people is super important to keep traction and consistency. Additionally, there is a possibility that your agencies and suppliers may already be doing a lot of this work which means you don’t need to start from scratch, you just need to adapt the outputs to your measurable ‘big idea’ metrics.
• Throughout the collaborations it’s inevitable challenges might appear; managing risk should always form part of overall ESG thinking. While this might be potentially easier to identify in other categories or at least they may be more obvious (like energy consumption in the IT category or logistics and carbon in the F&B category) there are some very clear and key areas for concern that overlap the entire procurement team. For me and many of my agencies and suppliers it's modern slavery. Using tools like the Modern Slavery Index Methodology | Walk Free independent supplier audits and reviewing core policies (which should be standard due diligence on any RFP or onboarding policy) you can gather data and form a risk assessment as the starting point of governance to control the type of agencies and suppliers that you want to work with. This not only promotes the right approach for supplier selection but ensures that I'm working with like minded partners. There are countless other examples and areas of focus but as a starting point MSA is a big risk and one that can be actionable.
• Reporting once you have your objectives make sure you provide complete transparency for the business and your agencies and suppliers. Regular reporting to show progress, challenges, and future commitments to support your goal, highlight your partners and engage with your stakeholders. The ultimate ambition is to work on building a dashboard that my agencies and suppliers can feed into to support effectiveness and delivery automation.

 

Considering and including ESG in marketing procurement is a proactive and never-ending approach that requires continuous assessment, adaptation, and collaborations. By getting a plan in place - even if it’s testing this with one key supplier to start - can provide a steppingstone to a bigger and more integrated sustainability strategy and approach. You can then effectively mitigate potential challenges while upholding your collaborative commitments to ethical and sustainable practises.There’s no one-size fits all solution and no silver bullets, but the considerations in this post can serve as the start of a blueprint evolving over time... I’m curious, do you have a strategy for achieving ESG greatness in your own procurement category and how does it differ to the above?

Our next post if going to be an outside-in exploration of ESG, flipping the script and getting some spooky inspiration from Emily Ashton-Jelley's thought leadership. Get ready for a graveyard of fresh ideas, just in time for Halloween! 🎃