Eco-Effectiveness

BMW is a brand that cares deeply about sustainability. In 2021, the BMW UK team had twin priorities - to drive greater effectiveness from their media plan and contribute to the brand’s global ambition to have the most sustainable supply chain in the industry (which includes Media and Marketing).

At Wavemaker, we are acutely aware of the impact that media has on carbon emissions and so, as a key partner to BMW UK, we set out to truly make a difference. We created the Eco-Effectiveness index; fusing carbon impact data with econometric sales uplifts to allow us to integrate sustainability goals into the media optimisation puzzle.

We needed to manage the commercial realities of the BMW UK business and turn carbon impact into an optimisable quantity like sales growth or ROI.

We therefore set out to create a new optimisation currency – Eco-Effectiveness.

Eco-Effectiveness is a measure of the carbon impact of the marketing effort per sale that effort generates, rather than just per impact delivered.

The creation of this metric enables us to optimise towards Eco-Effectiveness models and thus identify that: - Media-driven carbon had reduced 25% YOY. - We can generate a 30% improvement in sales while creating no incremental environmental impact.

Not only is this benefitting BMW, but since the creation of this new system, Wavemaker UK has rolled it out across two further clients and due to the importance of the information, is rolling it into all future econometric projects as an output.