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Advertising is a fact of life; we see hundreds or thousands of commercials every day -- as much as we may try to avoid them. Yet few people think about the impact advertising has on the environment, so a new online carbon calculator has been launched to allow companies to measure the carbon footprint of their marketing campaigns.
The online tool, Noughtilus, was built specifically for the marketing industry and allows companies to track details like how many flights are associated with each campaign, how much energy and water has been used and how much paper space was filled with print adverts.
As you probably will have noticed (especially anyone who's ever read a fashion magazine) a fair few pages of all newspapers and half of most magazines are filled with advertising, which means there are huge overheads in paper and transport. As well as this, there is all the energy used in television and radio adverts, both creating them and displaying them, not to mention increasingly common Internet adverts.
When you consider that 3.6 million magazines and 7.6 million newspapers are produced in the UK every year, you can start to see the scale of the issue. The problem is, if all adverts were stopped today, most newspapers, magazines, websites and TV stations would go out of business soon afterwards -- including this one.
Better planning and more targeted advertising could help to lower the impact of advertising, but companies need to be able to track the carbon footprint of their campaigns, which is where the Noughtilus carbon calculator comes in.
"It's an essential tool for all organizations and companies interested in reducing their environmental footprint," says a Noughtilus statement. "It captures every dimension of an organization or company's marketing activities whether it is a print campaign across the UK press or a 2-day conference."
Noughtilus is currently still in testing, but the website is fully functional, and you can head over and give it a try today.
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