Shaping Tomorrow: Sustainability and Media

13 Jun 2011 – Frances Buckingham

This piece by Alicia Ayars and Frances Buckingham was originally published in FranklinRae’s Raedar Newsletter.

Media and entertainment companies shape public opinion, provide a voice for the voiceless and bring a welcome escape from the trials of daily life. They influence what we read, listen to and watch and yet companies within the media sector are often overlooked as major social and environmental actors. This is partly because the impact of media is not tangible; rather it is emotional and intellectual. The responsibility of media companies lies not in their physical footprint but their ability to influence consumers’ footprints through the ‘brainprints’ they leave on their audiences – and their potential to effect positive change is profound. But in the words of Lord Kelvin, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”, and how exactly do you go about measuring a brainprint?

To begin to tackle this question, media companies first need to acknowledge the role they play in shaping the sustainability debate. When SustainAbility first examined the Media & Entertainment sector in Good News & Bad (2002) and Through the Looking Glass (2004), few media companies produced sustainability reports, and those that did tended to focus on direct environmental footprints alone.

This is slowly changing, with companies like The Guardian Media Group leading the sector by setting a clear vision to “educate, influence and inspire” its audience on sustainability. Walt Disney Company sees its responsibility in shaping “the world of tomorrow” and states in its current Corporate Citizenship Report that “as a media company, our intellectual property and airtime are two of our most valuable assets”. Time Warner commits to bring high quality and socially responsible content to the public through expressing a “multitude of different perspectives…spotlighting important issues [and] provoking debate.”

Public commitments are to be welcomed, but the challenge that media companies face is one of accountability: being able to assess and articulate their progress against such claims. At SustainAbility we work with a wide range of businesses, such as Disney and Time Warner, to address exactly this kind of issue through our Engaging Stakeholders Network.

Encouragingly, we’re seeing some examples of media companies thinking creatively about how to measure their intangible impacts. The New York Times has recently started to decipher the life of its stories, in an attempt to understand the ideas at the ‘edges of today’ to better predict how they’re going to impact business decisions tomorrow. The Guardian discloses the number of unique visitors to its environment webpage as well as the number of editorial staff writing on environmental issues. It has also set 2012 targets for each product to “clearly articulate how it will help audiences and customers understand climate change and other key sustainability issues and what they can do to take action.”

Jo Confino, Executive Editor of the Guardian and Head of Sustainable Development for Guardian News and Media, points out, “being able to shout that we carried five times more stories on climate change than a competitor is a useful measure in one sense, but if all the coverage points to a disastrous future and readers sink deeper into denial as a result, then it is a pyrrhic victory”. Determining how many people you’re reaching is one thing, but interpreting the impact of that – positive or negative – is much more complex.

So if we can’t measure it, should we still do it? In a word, yes: the ability to influence behaviour is ultimately where media companies have an advantage over all other sectors. If any sector is well positioned to raise our levels of awareness, lead the debate on exploring solutions for some of the world’s most intractable social and environmental problems, change our views on what is and isn’t ‘acceptable’, and aid the transition towards more sustainable livelihoods, it is the media sector. The inherent difficulty in quantifying their impact should not deter media companies from trying. Their action today is vital in shaping the more sustainable world of tomorrow.