Non-profit organisation Sea Cleaners and outdoor media company JCDecaux have teamed up to combat world’s worst outdoor ads – litter.
Household name brands are running the worst outdoor ads in the world. They didn’t brief them, nor approve them, but they’re out there damaging their brand every day.
A study published in the Journal of Business Research*, and validated for the local market by Nielsen, shows that when a brand appears as litter, people are willing to pay less for its products – 2% less.
Every discarded bottle, can or wrapper becomes an unintended brand impression. And unlike traditional outdoor media, these impressions can actively damage perception rather than build it.
Sea Cleaners has been operating for 23 years, removing more than 21 million litres of rubbish from New Zealand’s coastlines and waterways. Now, it wants to help brands understand and respond to the negative impressions litter can cause.
Litter as unplanned media
So on April 2, Sea Cleaners and JCDecaux launched Reverse Media Schedules, a new media product that treats litter as a form of unplanned media and measures the value of removing it.
Sea Cleaners founding trustee Hayden Smith says: “The hardest part of the job isn’t picking up the litter, it’s the constant hustle required to raise funds and keep our boats in the water. This tool gives us a reason to talk to dozens of companies and a concrete business value that we are delivering for them.”
JCDecaux head of trading platforms Kurt Malcolm adds: “Removing the worst outdoor ads allows us to deliver on our sustainability commitments, but also our commitment to iconic, impactful out of home advertising and making sure our clients are only seen in the right way, in the right places.”
Reverse Media Schedules was developed by Dentsu Creative, along with advisory partners Finch and audience data experts Nielsen. It combines litter audits, audience data and media modelling to calculate where branded waste is appearing, how visible it is and the potential impact on consumer perception and purchasing behaviour.
A new way to think about sustainability
Research conducted by Nielsen surveying 1,000 people across 124 coastal destinations reinforces the impact. It found that 17.2% of people could recall specific brands they had seen as litter, days after visiting coastal areas, while 75% said they would view a brand more favourably if it supported clean-up efforts.
Already gaining momentum, brands in New Zealand including Heineken, Export and Monteith’s have invested in Reverse Media Schedules, committing a valuable financial contribution to help expand ocean clean-up efforts.
The initiative introduces a new way for brands to think about sustainability. Rather than treating clean-up as a charitable activity, it reframes it as a media investment that can help protect brand value while delivering measurable environmental impact.
Brett Colliver, CCO of dentsu New Zealand, says: “Good for the planet and for business. It’s unfortunate that those two things don’t intersect more often, but that’s why we feel that Sea Cleaners and JCDecaux have unlocked something powerful in ‘Reverse Media Schedules’. And what’s really exciting is that it’s a model that can be scaled around the world.”
Good for society and for business
The system also identifies hotspot locations, benchmarks brands against others in their category and estimates the value created by ongoing clean-up work. Businesses gain access to dashboards and reporting tools that track these insights and show the impact of supporting litter removal.
Reverse Media Schedules is designed to help scale those efforts by connecting environmental action with a model businesses already understand.
Dentsu Creative global chief creative partner John Mescall says: “The responsibility for litter lies not just with the public and companies creating packaging. It also lies with us, the advertisers who help those products become so popular. With media, creative and data being so intimately linked within our business, dentsu is uniquely positioned to create an innovation like this and it’s a fantastic demonstration of a key dentsu philosophy, Sanpo Yoshi – good for people, good for business, good for society.”
Credits
- Clients: Sea Cleaners, JC Decaux, DB Breweries Limited
- Creative agency: Dentsu Creative Aotearoa (New Zealand)
- Media agency: Dentsu Media Aotearoa (New Zealand)
- Production company: The Post Office
- Strategic advisors: Finch
- Research & audience measurement: Nielsen
*Research from the University of Manchester found consumers are willing to spend 2% less on a product they have seen as litter. Source: Roper, S and Parker, C (2013) Doing well by doing good: a quantitative investigation of the litter effect. Journal of Business Research, 66 (11). pp. 2262-2268. ISSN 0148-2963
