A great example of this is this video, which the girls and guys at our social media practice, social@ogilvy, helped put together for IBM. It’s the smallest movie because it has was produced by nanophysicists using a scanning tunneling microscope, and is based on moving individual atoms around. Have a look at see what you think by watching the video here

Then read about the full story here.

Andrew

 Interning for OgilvyEarth was therefore an obvious choice for me and my first and only preference.  I’ve always been impressed and interested by Ogilvy and my passion lies with sustainability.  The opportunity to work with an organization that supports many of the values I’ve grown up with is inspiring. 

The projects that my boss Andrew has set up for me to accomplish over the month illustrate the growing interest and need for quality PR in order to effectively communicate an organization’s sustainability goals. 

If meeting the other interns this morning didn’t calm my nerves, meeting the Ogilvy team certainly has.  The office has a great vibe. I’m looking forward to the month ahead!

 A picture is worth a thousand words.

And it can cut through debates that are otherwise characterised by complexity, confusion and rhetoric.

That is why OgilvyEarth was delighted to exhibit photographs by the Climate Institute’s first creative fellow, renowned photographer, Michael Hall in the lobby of OgilvyHouse over the course of the last four weeks.

 The photographs speak to the pressing issue of climate change. They generated a huge amount of interest among Ogilvy’s clients, and the several hundred people who work in Ogilvy House.

 Hall is a Sydney-based photographer with over twenty years experience and has received praise from the likes of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. A near fatal cycling accident with a semi-trailer in 2007 and a life-changing period of recovery and reflection led Hall to start a climate change project, capturing over 300 photographs from around the world, covering a range of issues affected by climate change. While his Fellowship has received seed funding, additional partners are needed to bring his work to life.

 OgilvyEarth is proud to be a Major Climate Partner of the Climate Institute, Australia’s foremost thinktank on climate change.

 And we are delighted that the Institute is pioneering new ways of communicating this issue to people.

 For more information see www.climateinstitute.org.au.

Businesses for a Clean Economy is a group of 300 international and Australian companies who support carbon pricing. The group includes Westpac, Grocon, AGL, Fujitsu, IKEA and Vestas.  They asked OgilvyEarth to assist with media relations to promote their stance at the time that carbon pricing was introduced into the Australian economy on 1 July 2012.

INSIGHT

Due to the politically sensitive nature of the issue, it was critical to create nuanced media content and a carefully judged press conference that had maximum impact, but avoided the group becoming drawn into the political debate in a negative way. We provided strategic counsel on how best to handle media relations to ensure maximum positive impact. 

RESULT

The Businesses for a Clean Economy stance received over 210 pieces of press coverage, which were overwhelmingly positive. This included the front page of Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review. The press conference was streamed live on ABC News 24 and carried on all major TV evening news. There were over references to the event on radio, and over 100 articles written online. Retweets reached over 200,000.

For us, however, the biggest mark of success was that over 100 companies joined Businesses for a Clean Economy in the 72 hours after the campaign, a 30% increase in membership.

A couple of years ago I was stuck in transit for three days in Doha following a snowstorm at Tehran Airport (don’t ask!).  As the UN negotiations run into the night, climate negotiators from around the world will no doubt feel just as trapped in the convention centre. But they should take some comfort from knowing that the fight to prevent dangerous climate change is now more important as ever.

I was interviewed about the climate report, community relations and the negotiations on the ABC’s PM program yesterday evening. Have a listen and see what you think – feel free to leave a comment*

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3646423.htm

Andrew

*except if it is about me having a face for radio

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating put it another way: “In a two horse race, always back the one called self-interest”.

Those of us who work with companies to engage in the sustainability space often appeal to what might be termed enlightened self-interest. We talk about the benefits of the action: to reputation, to brand, to sales. Sometimes, these arguments are defensive: if you don’t act sustainably, you will lose your social licence to operate (or maybe even your legal licence). Sometimes, they are more positively framed: act sustainably, and you will benefit from an enhanced reputation, and an ability to charge motivated consumers more for your product or service.

But it has always been an uphill struggle, because the benefits are often indirect or intangible. It is hard to draw a direct link between operating in a more sustainable way, and financial reward. A company’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders. This is not just a general concept: it is a legal requirement. And until firms believe that aggressive action to reduce their environmental footprint is in their shareholders’ interest, there is a limit to the amount of resources they can devote to it. To put it another way: until there is a line of sight to a return on investment, efforts to minimise environmental impact will not, for the majority of companies, be a core focus.

The good news is that this line of sight is coming. There is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that, at least in specific industries and specific areas of sustainability, there is an increasingly a direct link between investment in sustainability and shareholder value.

Last week, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) – a partner of OgilvyEarth – released its annual ‘Global 500’ climate change report, an analysis of climate change disclosures made through CDP by the 500 largest listed companies in world, on behalf of 655 investors with assets of USD$78 trillion. That such a large number of institutional investors want to know this information is encouraging enough, but one particular finding – almost buried in the report – was particularly telling. This is that the 33 companies identified by CDP as ‘carbon performance leaders’ among the Global 500 outperform the others.

And not by a little bit. The companies that make up the ‘Carbon Performance Leadership Index’ delivered more than double the average returns of than companies outside the leadership subset. For the financially-minded among you, ‘return’ includes interest, capital gains, dividends and distributions (full details in the report).

For companies, this is the line of sight to a return on investment. This is self-interest writ large, naked and uncompromising. Hallelujah!

Of course, equity market performance is influenced by a broad range of factors, of which carbon management is but one. It is one thing to find a correlation, and another to find causality. I am not suggesting that improved carbon management will cause a company’s share price to go up (and you should certainly not run off and make investment decisions based on this column…). But the findings do show that good carbon management has, for most of the past two years, been associated with significantly above-average market performance.

Part of this may be because investors are increasingly pricing in the financial risk to a company from climate change (or at least from energy prices) and are seeking to reallocate assets to minimise exposure to these risks. Part of this may be because companies that manage carbon risks well, also happen to manage other risks well. And part of this may be because good carbon management strategies may be a proxy for good management overall.

This merits further analysis. But for now, those of us who want to see companies reduce emissions and drive sustainable business practices should revel in this finding. Nothing focuses a company’s mind like its return to investors. And it is increasingly looking like companies that do a good job of disclosing and reducing their emissions, return more money to investors.

The CDP study is not alone. In June this year, Deutsche Bank conducted a meta-study: a global assessment of over one hundred studies that sought to ascertain whether companies with high ratings for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors performed better than their peers. The results were striking: 89% of studies showed that companies with strong ESG credentials exhibited market-based outperformance. Further, every single one of the more than 100 studies indicated that companies with high ratings for ESG have a lower cost of capital. In the words of Deutsche Bank, “the market recognizes that these companies have a lower risk than other companies and rewards them accordingly.”

It is not surprising that investors are more and more interested in the sustainability performance of companies. The Investor Group on Climate Change Australia/New Zealand represents institutional investors with total funds under management of approximately $900 billion, with the aim of encouraging government policies and investment practices that address the risks and opportunities of climate change, for the ultimate benefit of investors, such as super funds. It is from investors like these that the real impetus for companies to reduce their environmental impact will come from.

“Greed” said Gekko, “in all its forms, greed for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind”.

Call it greed, call it enlightened self-interest – the fact is that it appears that companies that put more into reducing their environmental impact, make more money. That is the ultimate motivator. It is a finding even Gordon Gekko can agree with.

Andrew Ure is Managing Director of OgilvyEarth, the sustainability practice of Ogilvy Public Relations. www.ogilvyearth.com.au 
This blog first appeared in RenewEconomy: (http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/sustainability-and-greed-unlikely-bedfellows-61641)

“The ringing of the bell marked the launch of CDP’s annual S&P 500 Climate Change Report analysing how the largest listed companies in the US are progressing toward a lower-carbon future. OgilvyEarth is CDP’s official Australian Communications Partner and the two organisations work closely together to ensure that CDP’s important messages resonate.

CDP is a great partner for OgilvyEarth here in Australia.  CDP’s Australian office is located at Ogilvy House in Sydney, and CDP shares OgilvyEarth’s commitment to professional excellence. In a 2012 survey of 850 sustainability professionals carried out by GlobeScan/SustainAbility, CDP was ranked as the most credible corporate sustainability rating system in the world, ahead of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and the FTSE4GOOD Index Series.”

You can find out more about CDP on their website: https://www.cdproject.net/

This was not a surprise – the Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, foreshadowed the link at the COP17 Climate Conference in Durban in December. However, this announcement has the potential to further swing public opinion around to the idea that carbon pricing is not so bad after all.

Most of the media response has focused on the removal of the floor price. When the carbon ”tax” ends and the emissions trading scheme kicks in on 1 July 2015, the 200 or so Australian companies with a liability under carbon pricing have two options: reduce emissions themselves, or buy from others.

The floor price was designed to guarantee a minimum payment to these sellers. Now that it is gone, reducing emissions will be cheaper, at least in the short term, for Australian companies. They will be able to source credits from Europe, which yesterday were trading at $9.80 per tonne. They should be happy. So too should other Australians, because the cost to the economy of meeting Australia’s emissions target just came down.
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However, the longer-term public relations boost to the government comes from the link with the EU. The climate debate in Australia has been bedevilled since the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 by the claim Australia is too far ahead of other countries in dealing with the issue – that we are doing more than our fair share.

Other countries do price carbon. For example, parts of China are trialling emissions trading, as are parts of the US, and India has a carbon tax on coal. In fact, 30 per cent of the global economy will be covered by emissions trading by 2013. This has been lost in the debate, not least because Australia’s floor price made it one of the more expensive schemes around. However, now that it will effectively be synchronised with emissions trading in 30 countries, it will not be possible to mount the argument that we are going it alone. From a public relations perspective, this may be the single biggest benefit of the announcement.

Other aspects of the announcement are interesting from a PR perspective too. Why did the government choose to drop this good news now? Would it not have made sense to negate some of the more furious criticism about the cost of the scheme a few weeks ago? The timing of the announcement may have been planned, or it may simply have been that the negotiations with the EU did not reach a conclusion until now. Whether it was deliberate or not, the timing could not have been better.

The carbon price is in place, as is the sky. Australians are beginning to question whether the policy will actually cost them that much at all. Power bills for the first period to include carbon pricing have mostly not yet arrived. The government is making the most of this window – while critics of the scheme are feeling under pressure – to deliver another punch: it’s going to be cheaper than you thought, and we are falling into line with the rest of the world (or at least 30 other countries).

Added to this, governments tend to avoid reneging on agreements they have reached with other countries, regardless of who was in power at the time of the agreement. Some might argue it was reckless to commit the country to an approach predicated on a policy that the Opposition Leader has made clear he would like to repeal. There are no legal impediments to walking away from this deal with the Europeans if the scheme is repealed – but it’s not a good look.

There are negative aspects to the move. It’s bad news for some hardened climate activists, who support climate action but not emissions trading. It’s also potentially bad news for those who support preserving tropical forests as a means of storing carbon, as the EU does not accept these credits into its scheme.

But there can be little doubt this announcement has been a PR win for the government. In June, the Climate Institute, a think tank, released polling showing only 44 per cent of Australians believed the Coalition would repeal carbon pricing if they won power. This number must now surely drop further. Carbon pricing just got more difficult to dislodge.

Author: Andrew Ure, MD OgilvyEarth

This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August 2012.

This article first appeared in Renew Economy on 22 August 2012

Following the frenzy of commentary around the introduction of carbon pricing into the Australian economy on July 1, there has been a striking drop-off in coverage of the issue. With the sky firmly in place, and legs of lamb still in the weekly shopping basket, there has been relatively little to fan the flames of media interest.

One ember does remain: over the next three months, electricity bills will be arriving in households all over Australia. In NSW and Queensland, state governments have legislated to require bills to include a statement explicitly blaming the ‘federal carbon tax and green energy schemes’ for large cost hikes (a little naughtily, an annualised figure is used on the quarterly bills, and state-based policies are included). In any event, rising household energy costs appear to be shaping up as an attractive battleground for carbon critics over the next few months.

However, showing a media adeptness that has not always been evident over the past few years, the government has introduced a new dimension to the debate. With her landmark speech to the Energy Policy Institute on August 7, the Prime Minister went on the front foot.

She did not seek to downplay electricity price rises – she did the opposite, placing them centre stage, but laying the blame elsewhere, at the feet of Liberal state governments that have been “increasing their revenue at the expense of the family electricity bill”. Gillard said: “That has to stop”.

In reframing the debate to focus on the approximately 50 per cent of household power bills that goes on “poles and wires”, Gillard has reshaped this battleground. (Of course, it helps that all but two state governments are currently run by the Libs, even though ‘gold-plating’ is hardly a new phenomenon).

Regardless, a debate on rising energy costs, while not without drawbacks, plays into a key part of the Government’s mitigation agenda: the importance of energy efficiency. Could this long overlooked pillar of climate change policy finally have its turn in the sun?

There are reasons to believe it will. From an operational perspective one of these is obvious: the era of cheap energy is over, and energy efficiency can save households hundreds of dollars, and businesses anything up to millions of dollars, per year. However, energy efficiency also has a psychological advantage: unlike carbon pricing, you don’t need to believe in climate change to believe in energy efficiency. This means that there are no ideological obstacles to its uptake.

Some of the most vociferous opponents of action on climate change are making efforts to reduce their household’s energy use – in fact some describe this explicitly this as their ‘protection against the carbon price’. Companies that vocally opposed the introduction of carbon pricing have energy efficiency programs in place that saving tens of millions of dollars (and, as it happens, millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions).

Households and companies all over Australia can be encouraged to get on board with energy efficiency. Just don’t mention the C word. (In her speech, Gillard mentioned climate change just once, but I think she got away with it).

In fact, in practical terms, it may be best not to mention ‘energy efficiency’ either. The term is so broad as to have little meaning for the average Australian. Instead, proponents would do well to focus on articulating the benefits of specific activities – such as buying efficient equipment, or turning the TV off at the wall.

And this should be easier and easier as the media focuses on rising energy bills. In this context, initiatives such as the Telegraph’s One Big Switch campaign serve to help people understand that an energy bill is not something that happens to you: it is something you can influence. The more the media talk up the costs of energy, the more opportunities there are to educate Australians on how to use less of it.

The media cycle is about to provide energy efficiency with a chance to shine. The broad concept has bipartisan support. Efficiency measures can help households and businesses protect themselves against rising energy prices (including carbon price impacts). Those who are driven by the environmental benefits of energy efficiency should be delighted. They should be in love with One Big Switch. But for the moment, it’s probably best they stay in the closet. Energy efficiency is the climate fix that dare not speak its name.

One the one hand, the case for action seems straightforward. The debate over whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real is over, at least in the scientific community. Treasury modeling of the potential impacts of climate change makes it clear that taking action on climate change is in Australia’s national interest. Much of corporate Australia agrees with this. And all major political parties advocate taking action on climate change.

So why, according to figures just released in the Climate Institute’s annual survey of Australian attitudes towards climate change, Climate of the Nation, do 65 per cent of Australians believe that there are too many conflicting opinions for the public to be sure about the claims made about climate change? Where does all this confusion come from?

It certainly does not come from a lack of information. If Bob Dylan had a cent for every media mention of climate change, he would probably never have got the tombstone blues, the freight train blues or even the subterranean homesick blues. Australians have had climate change shoved down their throat. Thousands of views have been canvassed, thousands of views have been offered.

Amongst this discordant cacophony, no one has been able to make their message resonate – not the government, not the opposition, not scientists, not climate science ‘deniers’, not NGOs, not community activists, not the private sector.

This has confused the population, and clouded their response to carbon pricing. Only 28 per cent of respondents in the Climate Institute poll (carried out by John Scales for JWS) said they supported the government’s scheme. However, when basic aspects of the legislation are explained, the number jumps to almost 50 per cent. This is not to make a comment on the merits or otherwise of the government’s particular scheme – it rather illustrates the point that people don’t support things they don’t understand. And they don’t understand carbon pricing.

This is fair enough. As public policy goes, it is complex and nuanced. Even the policy wonks struggle to get their heads round it at times. Several popular criticisms of action on climate change stem directly from misunderstandings about how the government’s scheme might work (these criticisms may also be leveled at other schemes). Here are three key sources of confusion:

1. It won’t make a difference because Australia is only a small part of global emissions
2. It won’t make a difference because industry will move overseas and pollute from there
3. It won’t make a difference because we are going to compensate the polluters – so there is no reason for them to act.

There are very good answers to all three points. But this is entering a level of detail beyond the point at which the public would normally engage in public policy. Debunking incorrect information is necessary. But arguing the toss on the details of particular arguments is pointless – people end up confused and disengaged. Instead, advocates of climate change action would do well to focus on some key communication approaches:

• Appeal to the emotional: Use language and imagery that appeals to people’s emotional rather than intellectual side. This is something marketers have honed for decades.
• Use third-party advocates: There is no academy of science in the world that disputes the science. Other voices lend credibility to your arguments.
•  Point to peers: Highlight what others, faced with the same problem, have done. The vast majority of countries have some form of measure in place to combat climate change.
• Talk about the alternative: Instead of allowing the debate to focus on the intricacies of different schemes, focus on the costs of inaction.
• Make it local: Talk about the impact of climate change on insurance bills and front lawns.

A recent poll by Fergus Hanson for the Lowy Institute showed that 38 per cent of Australians felt they had become ‘more concerned’ about climate change since the debate in Australia began. If this concern is to be harnessed into support for action, we need to do a much better job of telling the story, and a much better job of debunking the myths. “Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean,” Bob Dylan once remarked, “sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean”.

This article first appeared in Renew Economy, 25 July 2012.