For digital campaigns, whatever the country, creative teams use best practices when choosing, optimizing and/or compressing images, and even select ink-saving fonts. For their part, technical teams find solutions in terms of the languages used i.e. Java, JavaScript or C++ so that the website or application built uses less energy but offers users the same service quality. As a result of the Low-Tech Web by Design approach taken by engineers and developers, it is possible to cut energy consumption by a factor of five, in the knowledge that consumption always depends on the final medium (screen type, age of computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.) and the generation of electronic processors that it contains.
Brand Safety: this involves checking in a medium the environment in terms of content, where the advertising is placed due to the involvement of automated processes (programmatic). Within the media agencies, for the past 10 years, the Groupe has adopted dedicated policies and systems. Publicis Groupe Verified is an internal team of the Groupe whose role is to verify, in which environments the advertisements will appear and whether the traffic figures are accurate. This is a question of quality, responsibility and operates as a certification. This team also works with specialized and certified third-party companies that perform the same type of control (see press release of January 13, 2020).
Consideration of all audiences and their individual peculiarities, particularly when these are children or so-called vulnerable audiences, is key since responsible communication is also reflected by the methods chosen. In France, for example, creative agencies such as Publicis Conseil, with Prodigious, have chosen to systematically subtitle films and videos for all mediums. This approach is an extension of the French Advertising initiative – AACC – to promote the universal subtitling of advertising films, www.soustitronsnospublicites.aacc.fr. This more systematic approach is applied by other teams around the world, particularly in Europe.
For the past three years, the Groupe has been working on a tool whose objective is to help all teams reduce the environmental impact of their activities and achievements for clients. In 2020, Publicis Groupe finalized an ad hoc calculation tool, developed and monitored by Bureau Veritas for its calculation methodologies, in order to ensure compliance with the GHG Protocol to apply up-to-date emission factors, and to align with the Groupe’s targets for 2030 (see Section 4.5). A.L.I.C.E covers all of the Groupe’s major business lines: creation, production, media, events, data and technology. A.L.I.C.E makes it possible to analyze the impacts on a project-by-project basis, in order to identify reduction levers and increase the positive impacts through new, more frugal solutions, selected by the agency and offered to clients. The tool aims to measure and educate, leaving it to the teams to find the best local solutions and to discuss the choices with their clients.
A.L.I.C.E has already reduced the impact of the campaigns and projects assessed during this test year by more than 20%. The selection of less impactful options has made it possible to develop tailor-made offsetting operations for incompressible impacts. A.L.I.C.E thus encourages teams to think about the least impactful solutions very early on, even before analyzing them in the tool. Rollout across the entire Groupe is planned for 2021, with access for all employees via the Marcel platform. The objective is to strengthen an internal culture on this subject, and to sharpen everyone’s reflexes to reduce all environmental impacts.
