How do you include sustainability in your Creative Strategy?

There are 17 global goals, which each have sub-goals, so there can be a lot to unpack. Conduct a survey of your stakeholders to build a "materiality matrix" graph. This helps identify the top impact areas that matter for your stakeholders and business. Focusing on only a few sustainability goals to start is a great catalyst for building momentum. Identify inputs and outputs, understand the outcomes those outputs are influencing, set your baseline measurement, and aim for a 10% improvement. If efficiency is not driving the outcomes you are looking for, the process/system may need to change. Be honest about your vision, process, trials, successes, and failures. Genuine creative, copy, and claims help provide transparency for trust!

Sustainability is a multi-layered effort as it involves multiple stakeholders. For consumers, it may seem limited to making wiser buying decisions. But for organizations, sustainability needs to be imbibed in their DNA for it to come out evident to the world.

One of the most powerful tools to integrate sustainability into a creative strategy is through a theory of change model. This structured approach helps ensure your efforts lead to real, measurable outcomes. To truly embed sustainability into your creative strategy, use recognized standards. This way your efforts are actionable, measurable, and credible. At Recapture, we use Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) Open Standards to develop our theory of tripling the incomes of smallholder indigenous farmers through regenerative forestry. We clearly identify the issue and the long-term vision, map the pressures influencing the problem, and identify the defined inputs, outputs, and outcomes necessary to achieve the vision.

Going beyond your marketing audience and tying them directly to the impact requires crafting a situation analysis with your team and engaging the stakeholders directly. Map the drivers and barriers influencing the issue. Ensure all stakeholders, especially marginalized communities, are engaged with informed consent. Informed consent means more than just asking for consent, it's also understanding the conditioning and bias that removed this particular stakeholders sense of self-determination e.g. colonialism, imperialism. This step avoids projecting your goals onto others and truly reflects their needs.

The solution must be self-sustaining and viable without relying solely on financial mechanisms like carbon credits. For example, a carbon technology project that relies on carbon credits as its only revenue source is depending on a system where the planet might benefit, but the customer buying the credits feels taxed. For instance, Unilever emits 60 million tons of CO? annually—offsetting that would cost billions per year at $20/ton, which corporations can't afford indefinitely. This doesn’t create a long-term incentive. Sustainability solutions need to work beyond "green premiums," offering real value to all stakeholders, human and non-human alike, and ensuring a positive ROI that doesn't just depend on marketing and investor mechanisms.

With recent innovations like AI, being in a creative field can be challenging. Don't be afraid of change. We are in constant evolution and change, and being able to learn and adapt is the key to success. I believe these steps can always help. Firstly, you are not alone, meaning there is someone else that already learned and adapted. Replicate their work, learn what they did, how they did, and why they did it. Secondly, start adapting those changes into your own work. Be curious to test and fail. Be open to experimentation and creating new strategies with this. Lastly, be part of a community. Sharing your own experience and asking for advice is the best way we can learn and adapt.