SPEAKERS

Global Director, We Are AdGreen

For the best part of a decade Jo has led AdGreen: upskilling the advertising production sector in measuring, managing and reducing carbon emissions. The seeds for AdGreen were planted when production managing TV commercials and music videos for some of the finest production companies in the UK in 2010 – even getting Grammy nominated in the process! Bringing her own water bottle, hiring water coolers and setting up on-set recycling soon became supporting other production teams with advice, sharing template text for call sheets and helping suppliers adapt to offer more sustainable services.

Interest in AdGreen grew and led to being involved in both creating events for production folks to learn how to produce shoots with a reduced environmental impact, and in speaking at industry events such as Cannes Lions, the annual APA Masterclass, AICP Week in New York and Vancouver International Film Festival’s Sustainable Production Forum.

After a round of fundraising in peak-pandemic 2020, AdGreen in its current format was born.  AdGreen provides training to grow the carbon literate workforce in the UK, and beyond. This ever-expanding community is adept at producing amazing creative work, but on a reduced carbon budget. And since launching their carbon calculator in September 2021, AdGreen also provide the means to measure, enabling production teams to identify activities with the biggest carbon impact, and advertisers to obtain the information they need for procurement decisions and corporate reporting. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure – and yes, Jo has lost count of how many times she has said that!

Balancing client expectations with what’s possible in the fast paced world of content production has always been challenging, and this is even truer when it comes to doing so as sustainably as possible. AdGreen continue to gather feedback about their training, tools, and resources, to deliver the most user friendly yet robust offerings they can.

And AdGreen has come a long way. In 2023 they published their first annual review: a testament to those who are leading the charge in measurement and reduction, and to the work put in to support them.

Visit weareadgreen.org to find out more on training and download the annual review. Register for the carbon calculator here calc.weareadgreen.org/request-access.