With regard to vulnerable audiences: the Groupe defends and promotes the rules set out in the guide Marketing & Advertising to Children of the lCC on the specific responsibilities that brands and agencies must have with regard to children and adolescents, whether in terms of product categories to be promoted or communication techniques used. This code provides a framework for communication intended for children (under 12 years old) and adolescents (between 13 and 18 years old).
Digital accessibility or e-accessibility: for almost 10 years now, teams of digital accessibility experts have been mobilized upstream of projects, particularly within Razorfish and Publicis Sapient whose dedictated team is based between Toronto and Gurgaon (India). Digital platforms designed for clients must meet the universal criteria issued by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in order to allow equal access to content, including for people with disabilities (visually impaired, blind, deaf, hearing-impaired, other types of physical difficulties, etc.) or with access difficulties. The key issue is the quality of the lines of code in order to simplify the indexing of pages, to facilitate reading of all elements of content (video, images, texts, links, navigation, etc.) for the end user, and to facilitate technical maintenance or content changes. In addition to compliance issues, these best practices also make the user experience simpler and more enjoyable. These expert teams may also be called upon for certification issues, as several employees are themselves duly qualified to do so.
In France, creative agencies such as Publicis Conseil, Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi have chosen to systematically subtitle films or videos for all media with Prodigious. This approach is an extension of the French Advertising initiative – AACC – to promote the universal subtitling of advertising films, www.soustitronsnospublicites.aacc.fr. This voluntary approach is applied by other teams around the world, particularly in Europe.
To determine the carbon emissions of goods and services, the first and simplest option is to apply emission factors to the total amount of purchases made, these emissions factors being public and international, by category of products and services. The second option is to measure the impact of the components of a product or service as closely as possible. This has been Publicis Groupe’s commitment since 2017 with the creation of A.L.I.C.E. Since the end of 2019, agencies in several countries have started using this 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 (emission factors from DEFRA - Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs -, ADEME - “Agence de la transition écologique” -, IEA - International Energy Agency -) and to align itself with the Groupe’s targets for 2030 (see Section 4.3). A.L.I.C.E covers all major Groupe business lines: creation, production, media, events, data, DBT (Digital Business Transformation) and makes it possible to respond to a request from clients on the calculation of the carbon impact of their marketing and communication activities. A.L.I.C.E makes it possible to analyze the impacts on a project-by-project basis, identify reduction levers and increase the positive impacts through new, more frugal solutions, selected by the agency and offered to clients. The tool also has an educational purpose in order to train employees for a better understanding of environmental impacts by giving them free rein to find the best local solutions and decide on the choices with their clients.
A.L.I.C.E has already made it possible to significantly reduce the impacts of the campaigns and projects that have been assessed, thanks to the upstream reflection that is undertaken well before measuring the impacts of a project. In 2021, Prodigious carried out more than 200 assessments of different productions shared with clients in France. This exercise allows the agency to now have an impact framework enabling it to better anticipate certain aspects of production. These first measures enabled to reduce the impacts by 20% on average, and the measurements made on the weight of visuals and/or video formats can lead to a 50% reduction in electrical consumption. The agency has therefore defined new production standards to maintain visual quality and minimize these impacts.
A.L.I.C.E has an important educational role for all the teams who use it: the tool enables them to understand and materialize the impacts of our projects and make the environmental impact and our levers tangible, in order to design less impactful solutions very early on; the objective is to strengthen internal culture and sharpen everyone’s reflexes to reduce all environmental impacts. 500 key users were trained in 2021 and the effort continues in 2022.
A.L.I.C.E was presented in 2021 to clients from very different sectors; everyone showed a keen interest in this fairly simple impact measurement, which is much more accurate and precise than impact measurements based on expenditure amounts alone.
A.L.I.C.E’s governance is managed by the Groupe’s CSR Department with a cross-functional project group of around twenty employees from different business lines and countries, actively participating in ALICE’s improvements and developments. Bureau Veritas acts as a trusted third party and ensures compliance with the methodological framework; a critical review is underway with an external third party (Green-IT / Resilio) in order to measure the digital impacts of the servers and data centers in particular.
