Zero: The Big Number We’re Aiming For
Zero.
It’s not a number you often hear an agency like TMD aiming for.
Zero is normally bad — Zero click-throughs to a website, zero tickets sold for an event, zero sales of a product. All territories to avoid.
And yet, today we’re announcing that zero is our big goal. Net zero, to be exact — and we’re going to reach it by the end of 2025.
This initiative is part of the our commitment to reduce our environmental impact and address the urgent challenge of climate change. In moving to net zero, we aim to cut carbon emissions as much as possible, and offset where reducing emissions to zero is not feasible. We are currently finalising calculations to understand our current annual footprint.
Our Founder and CEO, Christopher Graham, said: “My background is in the renewables sector so I’ve been working in the net zero space back before anyone thought to call it that. Since founding The Marketing Department, we’ve worked with various organisations who themselves are working to help Scotland achieve net zero by 2045. We’ve learned a lot from this, and with the climate crisis accelerating, it’s time for us to pull our weight and do our bit.”
The Scottish Government has set a target of Scotland being net zero by 2045, but we believe that this is only achievable if all organisations put carbon reduction at the heart of their operations. Chris added: “There’s a lot of pressure on the large emitters — oil and gas, manufacturing and the like — to cut carbon emissions, but there seems to be very little going on to educate SMEs of their role. By taking on this challenge, we hope to set an example not only to our colleagues in the creative sector, but also to our clients and suppliers.”
TMD’s carbon output consists of operations at our headquarters in Govan, and at the sites of events we run for our broad range of clients. The scale of the challenge is daunting but we are undeterred.
“The plan to get to net zero isn’t set in stone — we’ve got a lot to learn and we’ll undoubtedly make changes along the way,” said James Anderson, Creative Director, “The important thing is that the reduction of carbon emissions becomes core to all of our projects. And we’re committed to this — eventually we’ll be requiring all of our suppliers to working towards net zero. That’s everyone from courier companies to the events venues that we use.”
The Marketing Department’s move to net zero started when we played a role at COP26 in 2021. Appointed to design and operate a brand space for principal sponsor SSE, we were required to work to extremely high sustainability standards to ensure compliance with United Nations requirements.
“That’s when we started to realise that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Chris said, “And we’re hoping that by being part of the solution other people will take inspiration from that and start to explore how they can do their bit, too.”
