Webmart, winners of the Sustainability Award at this year’s SMP awards, are B-Corp specialists in sustainable integrated marketing including digital, print, data and letterbox solutions. To find out just what makes this business tick, we spoke to Client Services Director, Tom Oldershaw about their success story.

Can you tell us about your journey with sustainability?

It’s been a key part of our business since day one. Our founder has always been passionate about it and so it’s never been a tick box exercise. We even invested in a forest in Scotland many years ago!

More recently we’ve invested hugely in creating carbon calculators for offline and online marketing to help us really add value to our clients. We now ‘calculate, mitigate, offset, communicate’. Calculate the existing emissions of a campaign across all channels, mitigate the carbon as much as possible, offset what’s left, and then communicate that to the end user.

How has your organisation embraced sustainability over the last year?

We’ve invested hugely in building carbon calculators, we’ve become a B-Corp, and we’ve worked very hard to reduce our own carbon emissions as a business, moving to a fully electric fleet, installing further solar panels, amongst lots of other fantastic initiatives.

Why do you think the Sustainability Award is important to the print industry?

Scope 3 emissions are a huge part of everyone’s net zero targets, and marketing seems to be flying under the radar whilst being a huge contributor. Recognising this and mitigating these emissions is huge for our industry.

What inspired you to enter the awards?

We have been passionate about this for some time and have made significant investments in carbon calculations to help us talk to our clients about how to reduce the impact of their offline (and online) marketing – so it seemed only right to enter this award.

How do you think the SMP Awards benefit the industry?

The industry is a lot larger and important than people think, and getting together to celebrate shows that. There’s lots of exciting things happening – these awards recognise that and are helping us stand tall against the other channels.

How do you think the SMP can benefit the print and mail industry going forward?

Mail plays a huge part in the marketing mix, but can be complicated, so is easily overlooked. We need to keep shouting and showcasing the impact it has as a channel.

How do you think the Sustainability Award can impact the industry going forward?

I feel it will become an award that, year by year, will become more hotly contested. As marketing and sustainability directors are given more concrete sustainability goals, winning an award that showcases the great work in that area is going to become even more coveted.

In your opinion, how can the print and mail industries work to improve sustainability?

We need to work harder to mitigate emissions. I see far too many comments in our industry about offsetting the carbon of campaigns – that’s just the start, mitigation is what makes the difference.

Is greenwashing something you have to consider when working within the industry?

It absolutely is. Our industry has been unfairly branded as ‘bad for the environment’, yet paper is made from a renewable, sustainable resource – trees.  Digital marketing has a HUGE carbon impact, it’s very rarely mentioned and something we need to address.

What does it mean to you to be the Sustainability Award winner?

It means a huge amount. We have been on this journey for some time. The business has held sustainability at the heart of what we do for 26 years, since we were established. We’ve become known as the ‘sustainable integrated marketing agency’, so to be recognised for our efforts at the SMP Awards is fantastic.

It’s exciting that sustainability is becoming more and more relevant to people – it’s something that we are really passionate about, and winning awards re-enforces the great work we are already doing for our customers, so we’re really happy to have won the award.

Do you think the Sustainability Award can inspire more people to prioritise sustainable practices within the industry?

I hope so. Awards shouldn’t be the driver for change, but if it helps people go on the journey, it’s never a bad thing.

Head to our membership page to find out more about how the SMP supports businesses like Webmart. If you’d like to discuss how we can support your business, please get in touch with our team.