Influencing The Influencers

The Carbon Trust was set up by the government to assist company bosses and senior management to reduce their businesses carbon emissions and save them money by providing information, practical advice, and strategic expertise. By 2009 it developed a raft of unique services for large companies, helping them to better understand the opportunities that a low carbon economy will offer and to take action now. However there was concern that the global economic crisis was diverting attention away from the switch to a low carbon strategy. A fear backed up by an Economist report showing that 67% of large businesses believed climate change had already fallen down the boardroom agenda.

With the focus now on short-term gains such as tactical energy efficiency and waste reduction, the opportunity to incorporating a low carbon approach into new product development, technology development and implementation and resource allocation was being missed. The Trust’s challenge was to put the low-carbon economy back on the boardroom agenda at the UK’s top companies.

Decision makers in large businesses are a sceptical bunch and pure advertising doesn’t affect their priorities. However, they do pay attention to editorial voices, and the opinions of peers carry great weight. Such C-suite and senior management personnel continue to value newspapers and their digital brand extensions as a key part of their information diet.

The Trust’s strategy was designed to use the voices of their peers to get its message through. It teamed up with the Telegraph Media Group that had the greatest reach and authority among the target audience, to launch an editorially led print, event and online message that would resonate with our target audience.

Working for Change was designed to allow leading business figures to lead the debate and actively engage their peers and the wider community on the question of carbon reduction. The goal was to get the business community to create and host the debate, putting carbon reduction onto the agenda without the message appearing to come from outside the business community.

The ambition was to recruit senior business executives renowned for delivering thought leadership, and use them to deliver messages for The Telegraph’s business editorial. The content initiative was reinforced by advertising for Carbon Trust in the paper’s business section, and print activity was also backed up by a Working for Change microsite. This included video interviews with each executive, enabled for mobile download to an iPhone application. Articles were collated as a special supplement for The Spectator, TMG’s weekly political magazine, to spread the message wider. Finally, the Telegraph’s Business Editor hosted “Working for Change” breakfasts with specially invited guests. Our contributing executives appeared before an audience of their peers to provide further insights into big business carbon strategy.
 
The Carbon Trust message and partnership with the TMG reached more than 3 million business people. Videos had been viewed more than 13,000 times online, with more than 24,000 additional mobile downloads. More than 500 leading business figures accepted invitations to attend breakfast meetings. Participants included Barclays, Cadbury, Sainsbury, Centrica, Aviva, Shell, BAA NM Rothschild, Lloyds and the National Grid. In post campaign research over 27% of the key c-suite audience recalled the features and 35% correctly attributed them to the Carbon Trust. Most importantly over 55% of the key audience claimed that the campaign had shown them what they need to do to combat climate change.