Royal Mail launches £250,000 sustainability-oriented multichannel campaign

The initiative pairs several performance channels with a TV advert to promote making more sustainable choices within the delivery industry - both for services and consumers.

by Joseph Arthur 07 March 2023

Delivery company, Royal Mail, has launched its carbon conscious advert ‘Footprints’, encouraging consumers to send their parcels in a more eco-friendly fashion.

Created with the funds won from the 2022 Sky Zero Footprint Fund, Royal Mail invested £250,000 into the multichannel campaign. It will run on TV as well as linear and video on demand (VOD) platforms, with a mix of channels and programming from across Sky Media’s portfolio.

The TV creative was first unveiled in 2022 to a panel of judges at the Sky Zero Footprint Fund showcase event and was commended for the potential positive environmental impact it could have on UK consumers and the wider delivery industry.

Produced with the aid of creative agency AMV BBDO, Royal Mail worked with production house Thirty-Two and Anonymous Content, to adopt more sustainable production decisions and practices. This included minimising travel, large-scale art production and post production and signing up to ‘Ad Green’ to calculate and monitor the production’s carbon impact.

Sonia Sudhakar, Managing Director, Marketing and Digital at Royal Mail, said: “The business is committed to raising awareness about the real carbon impact of our parcel deliveries. Now, with the help of the Sky Zero Footprint Fund and AMV BBDO, we’ll campaign for our entire industry to do the same, thereby empowering customers to help tackle climate change.”

The campaign was informed by a number of insights, namely the fact that 70% of consumers would choose a more sustainable delivery option and 40% of consumers would be willing to pay more for that more sustainable delivery option, per the 2021 IMRG Consumer Home Delivery Review.

Sam Williams, Head of Strategy at AMV BBDO, added: “Over 4.2 billion parcels are sent in the UK every year, but we rarely ever stop to think about the impact on the environment of the things we send. The campaign seeks to wake us up to this reality by dramatising one of the key differentiators for Royal Mail, the fact that 2/3 of their parcels are delivered on foot, this enables them to have a dramatically ‘lighter’ carbon footprint.”