Marketreach (Royal Mail)

As consumers, 66% of us make sustainable choices. But as marketers, we do not!

66% of consumers say they have shifted their buying choices towards more sustainable products and businesses over the last 5 years. As an industry, marketing has talked a big game to join the fight for a more environmentally sustainable industry, yet in 2024, we are still responsible for almost 4% of the world’s emissions.

Many businesses are shifting focus to the environment with sustainability initiatives becoming front of mind. 62% of consumers believe they are more informed on climate change and sustainability than they were in 2023. More pressingly for businesses, the advertising industry has also come under scrutiny as a key contributor to climate change, with the now rapidly common usage of AI only accelerating this. Many media platforms claim to have made great strides in producing climate-friendly solutions, but sadly these have either struggled to make an impact or are simple greenwashing tactics.

It’s not easy being green, but it makes business sense.

We often consider ourselves a paperless industry, which is usually misconceived to be the greener option. This isn’t always the case. True, marketers often turn to digital marketing without even really thinking –but it’s still responsible for 7.2m tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.

Marketreach, the marketing authority on commercial Mail, is part of Royal Mail and is on a mission to get businesses to re-evaluate their media choices and turn to one of the most effective, and increasingly sustainable media channels. They want to educate marketing decision-makers and their respective agencies on how Mail can represent a change for good, whilst also delivering against a whole host of business metrics.

As a media owner operating in an industry with an increased focus on sustainability, as well as facing negative perceptions of the sustainability of mail, the need to highlight Mail’s circularity and promote sustainable practices has never been so important.

The Brief

Marketreach launched a ‘letters carbon lifecycle assessment tool’ created by a third party (WSP). It provides, for the first time, an in-depth look at the environmental impact and carbon emissions for each stage in the life of Mail – from forest source to end-of-life, through the processing, design, production, delivery and recycling stages. This comprehensive study allows businesses to fully understand the environmental impact of Mail, as well as guide Royal Mail’s strategy for improving the sustainable credentials across the format.

Marketreach created the tool and did the due diligence to show that Mail can be a more sustainable channel. Now it was time to educate the decision-makers.

To bring the circular advantage of Mail to life, it was critical to deliver against 2 core planning requirements:

1. Target the decision-makers at big businesses who influence sustainability choices.
2. Lead by example and create a more carbon-neutral media plan.

What We Did

Sustainable media choices

To ensure our campaign was as sustainable as possible, we used carbon-neutral channels/partners and offset our carbon where we couldn’t.

We utilised the Scope3 Climate Shield across all of our Digital activity to ensure we were making sustainable choices with our digital media buying. In our digital OOH, we worked with a media owner who partners with Climate Partner to offset 1,695,000 KGs of CO2 during this campaign. Additionally, we used carbon-neutral DOOH sites within coworking environments and our ads only ran between 8am and 6pm to eliminate waste. For our fly postering, we selected a media partner that was committed to offsetting the carbon dioxide created during the production process of the paper we use, so that all paper and ink used during print production was recyclable, carbon neutral and vegan.

Targeting the influencers

We ran outside back cover print ads with Business Insider and The Economist alongside high-impact skins across sites that indexed highly against our specifically targeting decision-makers at banks, tech firms and Telecoms.

OOH complimented this with flyposting in key business and commuter areas calling out the companies by name. We expanded OOH direct communications by hand-picking D6s within 144 office buildings and coworking spaces, including large businesses such as Natwest, Telefonica and Standard Chartered. This expanded our reach to members of the decision-making committee outside of the marketing department.

Tying this together was the Direct Mail campaign which put the message directly in the hands of UK marketers and senior decision-makers. The mailing used the data and best practice guidance from the LCA tool to lower its carbon impact.

This was supported by lower-funnel Social (on LinkedIn and Meta) and PPC activity to drive our target audience to the Marketreach site to consume more in-depth Sustainability content.