Fairglow measures the carbon footprint of cosmetic products. Everything related to cosmetic products. This means even measuring the impact of advertising.
Every day we are bombarded with a never-ending barrage of media designed to get us to purchase more products. Billboards, TV ads, digital ads, or even the sample products in tiny sachets you receive in magazines are forms of marketings. Like all human activity, each advertisement has an environmental impact. But exactly how polluting is marketing for cosmetic products? Is it big source of emissions or small?
Join us for our 4-part series on marketing emissions, where we reveal key findings from our 2023 research with a major French cosmetic brand.
The scope of our research into marketing emissions included four different media marketing modalities. The modalities and their emission sources are defined below :
Other marketing modalities exist, like Event Marketing, or Radio advertisements for example. We tailored our research to the above four modalities because our research partner utilized media in each of the modalities above to advertise their products. Our client's overall emissions from marketing looked like this, with over 50% of all their emissions coming from their printed media in magazines!
For clarification and precision in our research, we broke down each of these marketing modalities into 5 distinct life cycle stages to improve the granularity of our study. The life cycle stages - Office Related, Content Production, Media Production, Media Distribution, and Media Disposal - are defined below :
Office Related: office activities such as energy demands, employee commuting, and business travel. These are the emissions accounted for simply operating an office related to your marketing.
Content Production: activities related to photoshoots such as materials, catering, and equipment. Any emissions related to the creative production of an advertisement.
Media Production: physical and digital (servers analytics, network traffic, storage data providers) production of media. These are emissions related to the physical production of the advertisement, or in the digital sense.
Media Distribution: physical (delivery vehicles, postal services) and digital (data transfer digital vendors, consumer device emissions) distribution of media.
Media Disposal: the disposal of vinyl, paper or other physical materials.
These definitions help us to organize our research and are based on our review of the following helpful resources: