Universal Registration Document 2023

• many agencies must respond to specific compliance issues, such as Healthcare agencies. Communication in this sector is regulated in many countries. This requires that our teams are trained in the local regulatory framework and sometimes led by clients, who are subject to specific regulations involving a more demanding communication framework. The agency must ensure high compliance with different levels of joint validation between the operational and legal teams.

4.3.8.3 The proprietary tool: A.L.I.C.E. (Advertising Limiting Impacts & Carbon Emissions)

• 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, and 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, the agencies have been using this ad hoc calculation tool, developed and monitored by Bureau Veritas for calculation methodologies aligned with the GHG Protocol, and for updating emissions factors (emissions factors taken from the IEA – International Energy Agency; DEFRA – Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the United Kingdom; ADEME – French Ecological Transition Agency; the EPA – Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, etc.). A.L.I.C.E. is a tool for the Company’s Climate objectives for clients, in order to more precisely assess our ability to reduce the impacts of our products and services. 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, tested by the agency and offered to clients.
• A.L.I.C.E. has already made it possible to 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. The measurement also identifies easy‑to‑operate levers to reduce impacts by 20‑25%. This exercise gave the agency an impact framework to better anticipate certain aspects of production. For example reducing the size of visuals and/or video formats can generate more than 50% savings on electricity consumption. The agency has thus defined new production standards to maintain visual quality and minimize these energy consumption impacts. These standards are then shared with the Media teams, then with partners and supports. A.L.I.C.E. is used with more than 250 clients/brands.
• A.L.I.C.E. has an educational role to play with employees, allowing them to materialize concrete environmental impacts in order to imagine less impactful solutions early on. The objective is to sharpen everyone’s reflexes to reduce all environmental impacts. The clients for which the teams use A.L.I.C.E consider that the calculation method used is robust and that the cross‑functional approach to the Groupe’s various business lines provides unparalleled homogeneity of calculation. A.L.I.C.E. is an open system, making it possible to interface with other internal tools such as Razoscan, built with the support of Green IT and Epsilon’s Digilab. With respect to external partners, in 2022, A.L.I.C.E. hosted two APIs with experts in the measurement of media‑related impacts: Impact+ and Scope3. These two interfaces make it possible to refine the calculations of digital impacts, particularly those related to programmatic advertising. Other partnerships are underway.
• A.L.I.C.E.’s governance is the responsibility of the Groupe’s CSR Department with a cross‑functional project group of around twenty employees from different business lines and countries, actively participating in A.L.I.C.E.’s improvements and developments. Bureau Veritas acts as a trusted third party and ensures compliance with the methodological framework by assessing each improvement project. In 2022, a critical scientific review was conducted by an external third party, Resilio Solutions, based in Lausanne, in order to refine the measurement of digital impacts, particularly for calculations related to servers and data centers. A presentation methodological document is publicly available on the Groupe’s website in the CSR section of the Responsible Marketing section. In 2023, a commission of experts met to discuss the next steps in the development of the tool, given the more general changes in the measurement of environmental impacts.