Webmart introduced a small group of customers and suppliers to EcoMetrics at its Bicester office in what chairman Simon Biltcliffe calls a soft launch for the world’s first carbon calculator for both print and digital marketing campaigns.
EcoMetrics enables Webmart to calculate the carbon footprint of any marketing campaign, regardless of whether print, digital or combined. Calculators for print exist and recently MarketReach launched a carbon calculator for distribution, but there is little that can assess the impact of digital campaigns.
This is the gap that Webmart hopes to fill with EcoMetrics. It has taken three years of work to understand what needs to be calculated, gathering the data and then measuring it in granular detail so that the marketing business can generate estimates for different ways of working, using recycled papers rather than virgin stocks for example.
The company worked with Carbon Quota in gathering the data under ISO 16759 and PAS 2060 and 2050 protocols. It used Climate Partner to validate the approach and the calculations.
EcoMetrics builds on the work of Enviromail, Webmart’s measurement of print and doorstop delivery, using its knowledge of distribution centres, delivery areas and print plants to calculate the impact of producing and delivering direct mail, partially addressed mail and doorstop distribution.
Tom Maskill, Webmart’s sustainability and sales director, says: “We have been developing EcoMetrics for three years so we can work out the impact of a campaign over lots of channels so we can give marketers and sustainability professionals the data they need to make informed choices.”
Those choices rest on neologisms that Webmart has coined: the carbon cost per acquisition of a customer and the return on carbon emitted. Neither measurement has been possible before, but with a rapidly growing awareness among brands that greenwashing claims are counter productive and that sustainability needs to head the agenda, Webmart might be pushing at an unlocked door.
The first step towards these choices is the calculation, then the mitigation of environmental impacts by tweaking numbers and production methods – deducing and cleaning mailing lists is an easy gain. Next comes an offsetting point using Climate Partner projects to sequester to reduce carbon generation and finally there is a communication step to inform end customers that a campaign has undergo the carbon optimisation process.
