Bant Breen:

MSQ is a relatively young firm, it’s one of the most innovative marketing agencies now in the world, delivering solutions, truly integrated, broad-based marketing, communications, and Business Business Solutions. Tell me a little bit about how the chief sustainability officer got shaped and the types of stuff you’re working on.

James Cannings:

There are two pillars to what I’m working on. It came out of the first one. The first was like all companies, we became increasingly aware that having a path to net-zero and understanding what that means, was becoming more and more important. Sustainability in the broadest sense is always important, but with a party as a people business, I think a lot of agencies are relatively mature in terms of diversity and inclusion, and ethics. In the environmental sustainability piece, like lots of SMEs, we were kind of lagging because I had done this work at MMT. At that point, MMT was a carbon-negative organization. We’d measured our footprint, we’d done a lot of avoidance offsetting, and we were starting to put some good reduction strategies in place. It was relatively easy to pick that up and roll it out across the MSU agencies, that was a quick win, “How can we go carbon negative?” “How can we start to reduce our carbon footprint and put on net-zero targets?” That was kind of pillar one, keeping our house in order. There’s a lot that goes into being carbon negative. To have a net-zero strategy, formal science-based targets, on the military pledge there are lots of good things that we can do. That adds huge value. Of course, more and more get through the door to supply big companies. There’s this kind of commercial win-win with what I do that perhaps didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is why my job does exist. That in itself has huge value. But then the other pillar and the other focus of my work is around “What is our customer proposition?” Or “How do we layer environmental sustainability into our customer proposition?”

Bant Breen:

When you’re out there, James, talking to all of the different clients that MSQ has, what are the key topics on their minds? And how are they getting on the sustainability topic?

James Cannings:

Certainly, with my job flitting across MSQ, I’m not as actively engaged directly with the MSQ clients. But I do work very closely with our new business teams for whom being able to talk about this stuff is usually important and what is certainly noticed is that every single bit of new business, every single pitch we are responding to has a sustainability element. Everybody’s asking for it. That’s universal, there’s almost no pitch where they don’t want to know about your sustainability credentials. It’s primarily the work that we do on net-zero journeys or carbon-negative status or military pledges. All of the things that we do is hugely important. Those are really important assets because what I’m seeing at the moment is the primary driver is on the large organizations that we work on. They have net-zero targets more and more science-based. They know that includes their scope three, that includes their supply chain, and they know they’re not going to hit those targets unless they start to make sure that their suppliers go on that journey. 

Bant Breen:

What are some of the learnings that you’re taking away from this pandemic period that we can apply to some of the sustainability issues that we’re looking at now?

James Cannings:

It’s been incredibly tough for a lot of people and it continues to be tough. From an environmental sustainability point of view, it has been an incredible experiment. From that point of view, if I just take MSQ’s own footprint, because we’re a professional services company, it’s going to impact different people in different ways. We saw a complete collapse in our emissions of around about 50%. All driven by business, commuting, and travel collapsing. We saw an uptick of around about 9% because we also track homework permissions. You can’t just pat yourself on the back when your offices are shut down, if you’ve got everybody at home, what’s the incremental impact of that. It certainly doesn’t outweigh the travel. Then again, as a professional services company, that was hugely impacted from a revenue point of view, that wasn’t a 50% collapse in footprint, because our company was shrinking. We traded very well over the pandemic. What we need to do is kind of carry that data through, and I feel like my job at MSQ now we come out of it isn’t to dictate policy on I don’t have the power to say. We can’t fly, we can’t do this, we can’t do that. There are factors, there’s culture, there’s mental health, there’s the performance of the business. My job is to throw this into the mix. That we’re starting to think about the environmental sustainability benefits. Then finally, on the other pillar, there’s lots of evidence to show that there’s been this huge exponential growth in digital transformation. This is great because there are some huge environmental benefits of those digital transformations and what they’re enabling. For example, a lot more people using this type of technology. But there are a lot more examples. Just to re-emphasize what I talked about, we still need to be mindful of the carbon footprint of those digital platforms that we’re building.

Bant Breen:

James, it’s been great talking to you today. Thanks for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back. 

To see the full interview on the Uncaged Youtube channel, go to:

https://youtu.be/sa0t6CyYe5Q

 

 

 

E: qstudio@qnary.com