Balancing People, Profit and Planet with Assembly

Assembly is a global omnichannel media agency under the Stagwell banner, and in 2023, it had one of its biggest years in terms of its commitment to impact - both environmental and social. Sophia Parsons joined the agency in 2020 as global impact manager, and has since overseen the company’s efforts to decarbonise, as well as its work to support inclusivity and community within the industry. 

In 2023 alone, Assembly launched its Clean Media Lab, joined Ad Net Zero in the UK and US, started a carbon footprinting exercise, and involved itself in volunteering programmes across London, APAC, and MENA, giving back to local people. To mark this progress, Assembly published its 2023 impact report, which details the agency’s sustainability commitments and plans for the future. 

To discuss how they’re continuing these efforts in 2024 and beyond, LBB’s Ben Conway spoke with Sophia, discussing how this year will see Assembly elevate its impact strategy even further.

LBB> 2023 was a big year for Assembly Global’s impact and sustainability efforts. Has it become more of a focus - for Assembly and the industry -  since you joined as global impact manager in 2020?

Sophia> Sustainability has definitely come more into focus since I started as impact manager back in 2020. Impact has always been important to the agency and has existed in various iterations, however, it’s gone through an evolution period over the past couple of years. When I started, we had a big focus on social impact (which is still very important to the business) but didn’t have a huge amount of understanding of the environmental impact the business had, or its contribution to wider sustainability conversations. Since then, we’ve worked to improve these knowledge gaps. 

We recognise that businesses like ours have an influence when it comes to social and environmental responsibility. We are trusted by our people, our clients and our client’s customers to behave and act responsibly, so our strategy has developed to ensure this. Not only is sustainability one of the main pillar focuses of Assembly's overall strategy, but we now consider all aspects of sustainability and its correlation with our business impact.

The industry’s attitude has changed enormously since I’ve been working within this space. Every year, we see an increase in requests from current and prospective clients for our sustainability strategy and commitments. There’s also been a huge increase in industry movements, which we are excited to be a part of, from joining Ad Net Zero, to EcoVadis. All the right conversations are happening. However, we need more industry-wide guidance so we can collectively progress toward the same goal.

LBB> Your recent impact report says that Assembly puts purpose at its core - how are you structured and empowered to do that? Your global CEO Rick Acampora also says that the company is “redefining impact” - can you elaborate on that?

Sophia> We are structured and empowered to do this by having amazing global leadership in Gaby Sethi, who joined us in 2022. Gaby has been a huge part of helping us structure what sustainability means for the agency and how we empower that within our strategy and people. Our regional CEOs are very committed to impact and helping us enable it within each region too. And we are also empowered by the passion and commitment of our people. Really, impact must be an agency-wide effort to cause real change.  

In terms of redefining impact, we want impact to be a part of our business approach, rather than siloed. What we are aiming to do through redefining impact is make it a part of our people’s every day - ensuring we are providing the right volunteering opportunities, the right training opportunities, and that we are equipping our people to talk to clients about this topic. We want to ensure impact is very much embedded within the DNA of the company so that when someone joins us or a client decides to work with us, they know they are working with an agency that takes social and environmental responsibility seriously as it’s a crucial part of what we do.  

LBB> You joined Ad Net Zero last year - how has that partnership helped so far?

Sophia> Joining ANZ has helped us enormously. It’s improved our understanding of how media and advertising fit and serve within the area of sustainability, particularly the subject of decarbonisation. It’s opened us up to the importance of industry wide guidance on how to action practises such as measuring the carbon impact of media.  

LBB> You’ve also recently worked with consultancy Anthesis to better understand your carbon footprint - what are the learnings, goals and commitments that arose from that?

Sophia> I think the main learning is the importance of having a relationship with a company that is a gold standard with this kind of work. It provides a deeper level of understanding and authenticity to what you are aiming for. They helped us understand what is achievable, the challenges that come with collecting data, and the importance of baselining. One of the main learnings from working with them, though, is not to rush the process and to focus on improving the data we are collecting to understand our impact.

LBB> Last year, Assembly launched its Clean Media Lab - tell us a bit about that!

Sophia> Clean Media Lab is something we are consistently developing and innovating. Ultimately, it’s our solution to supporting clients decarbonising their media, and in turn supporting the wider industry – very much feeding into Ad Net Zero’s five-point action plan, particularly Action 3.  

Clean Media Lab explores and assesses the current ecosystem of media decarbonisation initiatives to identify pathways forward with maximal impact and has the capability to help clients understand the carbon emissions of their campaigns. Clean Media Lab also helps us understand what efficiencies can be made within campaigns, where we follow industry recommendations from institutions such as GARM and IAB tech lab. Through the platform, we also think about how we portray sustainable lifestyles and futures. 

Our goal is to minimise the total impact of campaigns, from strategy through to execution, and develop ways to make meaningful steps towards sustainability goals through investments in media.   

LBB> Assembly also launched Partners for Progress and WeAre8 in the US last year - how will this empower your and other members’ impact programmes going forward?

Sophia> The launch of these partnerships were such exciting moments for Assembly. We want to foster an inclusive environment across all aspects of our business – Partners for Progress helps us diversify our audiences and have us a part of these conversations within the industry. We also want to be at the forefront of exciting launches like WeAre8 because we love to empower platforms that have the same ethos and intent as us, but also are making waves and creating change in the way we view media. We hope that seeing us launch programs like these will empower other members and industry leaders to make changes alongside us.

LBB> Inclusivity and community work are also big priorities for Assembly - what are some of your initiatives in those spaces?

Sophia> Community work is something that’s been at the heart of our impact proposition for 10+ years now. As we have grown and developed as an agency, this is something that has not left us over the years. We really want to ensure that every region is empowered to give back to their communities, which is why we look for ways to allow our strategy to enable that. 

When it comes to inclusivity - another important focus area for the agency - we want to ensure we are continuing to build out our practices with this core pillar in mind. We don’t approach inclusivity as a ‘one-stop-shop’; we want to make sure we are thinking about inclusivity at all levels of our business, from our people to the partners we work with, to the audiences we are engaging for our clients.  

LBB> Is the industry getting complacent? Is progress sliding back after a promising few years? Or is there reason to be hopeful about sustainability and inclusivity in advertising right now?

Sophia> I think there are definitely loads of reasons to be hopeful. The solutions are out there, we have the technology and the minds to support it, and there are solutions available to help us understand the impact our work is having. The main challenge for the industry is preventing these solutions for measuring the impact of media from becoming a competitive element to win business, and stopping companies gatekeeping information. What we need from the industry, if we are to face the climate crisis head-on, is collaboration - agencies working together and knowledge-sharing to come up with the most effective solution to help us achieve a sustainable future.

Another challenge the industry faces is the lack of industry-wide guidance on how to address and report on sustainability. Right now, I think we face the risk of players ‘marking their own homework’ with no formal guidance to help agencies understand how they should be reporting on their impact on themselves and their clients. Whilst different agencies, groups and platforms are all marketing their solutions and strategies on how to cater to a sustainable future, we are at risk of confusing clients and consumers on what is the ‘right way’ to do this. This is one of the ways our membership with Ad Net Zero and their resources is helping us ensure that the work we are doing around sustainability is in line with industry standards.  

LBB> What are the biggest challenges you’re facing day-to-day as an impact manager - and how are you overcoming them?

Sophia> The biggest challenges I face in my day-to-day role is ensuring all of our work balances in both business and sustainability interests, and ensuring all stakeholder needs are met to a satisfying standard. As we are part of the Stagwell Group, we have to be realistic in our goals and ensure we are considering wider business targets. In terms of overcoming this, I believe these two priorities can co-exist in harmony, it’s just about demonstrating how one benefits the other. Having a robust sustainability strategy and targets can benefit business goals such as onboarding new business, attracting talent, retaining existing clients, and improving employee satisfaction. Demonstrating these effectively can really help you overcome challenges such as finding the balance between people, profit and planet.  

LBB> What are some of Assembly’s main impact goals for 2024 and beyond? 

Sophia> We believe that our impact goals for 2024 are going to help elevate our impact strategy. Firstly, we want to set reduction targets for our emissions at a global level this year. 

2022 marked the first year we had ever assessed our carbon footprint, helping us understand the make-up of our greenhouse gas inventory. It was a huge learning process for us to understand the data collection process, how to access data, and where we need to improve it (rather than relying on estimations). The beginning of 2022 also still saw us at the backend of operating within covid rules. As an agency, we weren’t back to offices on a regular basis and a lot of our client communications were still done online rather than in-person. 

2023 was our first full year back to business as usual, which allowed us to set goals that were on an accurate baseline. We are currently data collecting for 2023, so depending on how different those two years look in terms of emissions, we will set a reduction target based on a 2022 or 2023 baseline. We are extremely excited to get this in place, to say the least. 

Another goal for us this year is more education for our people on sustainability within media. As our clients grow their sustainability strategies and the conversation of this subject comes up more within the industry, we want to make sure that our people are equipped to take part in those conversations, building their confidence and knowledge on the role sustainability has to play within the industry.

You can learn more about Assembly’s sustainability commitments and download the full 2023 Impact Report here.