Did you know that customers prefer to shop with businesses that use sustainable practices? It’s true: 78% of customers say that whether a business leverages sustainability practices is important to their decision to purchase.
Customers have begun to view where they spend their money as a statement, and they’d rather spend their money with businesses that share their values; businesses that are committed to doing some good, and choosing to act instead of offer empty words. This, and the many other benefits associated with sustainable business practices, has caused 82% of businesses to aspire to greater sustainability within their organizations.
If you’re trying to refine your practices to incorporate sustainability considerations, have you thought about your video advertising practices? Video advertising has been increasingly put under the microscope, and for good reason.
Video advertising has a greenhouse effect on par with the aviation industry’s; namely, 4% of global emissions. If you truly want to reduce your carbon footprint, working sustainability into your video advertising practices is an absolute must.
Let’s talk about it.
Auditing Sustainability
Before reinventing your video production process, it’s important to get an idea of how much energy your current processes require. In other words, auditing your energy and resource consumption throughout video production. There are a few key ways to measure this, and we’ll dive into them here:
- Energy consumption: how much energy do your tools take to function? Are you incorporating eco-friendly options like LED lighting, renewable sources of power, or energy-efficient machinery in your production setup?
- Space utilization: how many employees occupy your video production studio at any given time? How much in resources (like air conditioning, heating, or lighting) is being allocated to that area? Are there opportunities to save on resource usage?
- Carbon footprint: Do you know your current company’s carbon footprint? How much of that footprint is being generated by your video production practices? What steps can you take to make your video production processes carbon-neutral?
An audit of this scale allows you to identify (1) how big your carbon emissions problem is, (2) how much of that problem is directly connected to video production, and (3) where you can possibly limit resource expenditure within your production process.
Incorporating Sustainability into the Production Process
Now that you’ve narrowed down the areas that need work, you can start making cuts. It’s important to acknowledge that as you begin to cut down on resource waste, you are in no way undercutting your product or your message; video marketing best practices like brand elements, targeting SEO, and clear, concise messaging are unaffected by such cuts. If anything, your cutting down on resource expenditure will add to your message, allowing you to talk about your organization’s sustainability efforts.
That being said, here are some of the ways you can begin putting limits on your energy consumption throughout video production:
- Leverage green screens: Green screens are cost-effective ways to create virtual sets. Opting for virtual sets over physical sets cuts down on manual labor, streamlining the production process. It also, coincidentally, cuts down on the resource expenditure required to build and transport physical sets.
- Invest in energy-efficient equipment: Energy-efficient production is designed to save as much energy as it can, only expending a limited amount of energy for necessary functions. This is one of the best ways to passively limit resource expenditure, as it allows your equipment to auto-set boundaries in line with best practices while still functioning well.
- Look into renewable resource power: Has your company considered investing in solar power? Or looked at your area to see if a power company near you uses power sourced from wind turbines? Solar and wind power are clean, renewable sources of energy that replace the more common, fossil-fuel burning methods, cutting down on your carbon footprint.
- Recycle digital assets: Did you know that every new file you create involves storing terabytes of data on the cloud, causing greater resource expenditure with each new project? Finding ways to recycle old assets is not only good for cutting down on time, but resource waste as well.
Conclusion
With such a large overall carbon footprint, ad tech has a significant role to play in affecting change. Being a part of that change is good for your budget, your company’s reputation, and your overall chances of remaining competitive in the future. Give green a chance, and see what grows as you invest into eco-conscious video production options.
