10% of the world’s energy goes into running the internet. And barely anyone knows it. Belong, a digital first Australian telco is committed to being a leading Australia’s environmental transformation and in 2020, they became the first Carbon Neutral accredited telco in Australia.

The only issue was that no one thought of their mobile network as a source of CO2.

To help sell the solution and drive customers growth, we had to give people a way to talk about the problem.

So we created a powerful new way to understand the impact of your digital and mobile data impact. The Carbon Thumbprint: each individual’s personal CO2 output created by their data use every year.

Working with Australia’s leading economists and sustainability experts, we created a formula that translates network usage to CO2 emissions. This formula unlocked an awareness campaign that spanned every media type.

We launched with an integrated campaign introducing the concept of the Carbon Thumbprint which lead to viewers to the Carbon Thumbprint app.

This app converts your mobile network usage into an amount of CO2, so you can see your personal data emissions. What’s more, the app displays your Carbon Thumbprint to scale using Augmented Reality and then directs you to neutralise your impact by switching to Belong.

Fundamental to the campaign was the work that made the execution true:

Firstly, we had to build a model to understand the conversion of data usage into CO2 creation, within the context of the Belong business in Australia. This essentially means that we needed to know the total emissions of Belong before we could break that down into individual impact per customer.

Then, we effectively had to weigh individual components of the internet, to understand how much impact each execution within the campaign would make when viewed by an audience.

The data required to view these pieces was then revealed in each execution, helping the audience understand in the moment, the effect of inaction.

This has created a campaign with stunning impact.