Over $500 billion dollars a year is spent on paid media advertising, returning significant profit to the media industry involved in the buying and selling of advertising space. But there is ever-growing awareness of the gravity of the climate crisis, and advertisers, consumers and industry leaders increasingly want to be part of the solution.
“We are excited to see advertisers and the media industry throw their weight behind global efforts to reverse the climate crisis,” says Niklas Hagelberg, the UNEP’s Climate Change Coordinator. “The climate emergency urges us to find new ways to expand and accelerate the rising tide of public support for climate action, especially in an increasingly fragmented media and content landscape. By reaching a mainstream audience of 30 million people through this one-country pilot alone, we see huge potential in this partnership’s capacity to ensure UNEP’s message of the importance and opportunities of climate action reaches many more people worldwide. We’re very grateful to our partner Blue Life, and their implementing partners who have worked tirelessly to bring this to life.”
While there are now high levels of awareness of climate change, there remains confusion and misinformation about what actions are necessary and wide misapprehension that climate action will have a negative impact on peoples’ lives.
Paid advertising media space offers the thoughtful targeting necessary to efficiently reach mainstream audiences and address these misconceptions. However, paid media space is usually prohibitively expensive. To solve this, at the core of the partnership’s concept is the idea that as media space is bought and sold, instead of creating profits margins with each trade, could some of the space be retained for climate positive messages, and therefore transform UNEP’s ability to reach widespread mainstream audiences with climate positive messages.
