Guest · Sustainability, purpose and inclusion
Richard Davis
Co-Founder & CEO, 51toCarbonZero
A media strategist turned climate technology founder, making the commercial case that decarbonising marketing is a balance sheet question, not a corporate responsibility one.
About
Richard Davis is Co-Founder and CEO of 51toCarbonZero, a venture-backed climate technology company he started in 2021 to bring transformation discipline, data and governance to decarbonisation in media, marketing and advertising. He works with agencies, advertising technology companies and publishers on measuring and reducing the carbon in the media supply chain, and is known for arguing that climate is now a profit and loss question rather than a corporate responsibility one.
Davis spent his career at the intersection of business growth, media and sustainability. Before founding his own company he was chief of business strategy for the global media business at Dentsu, a corporate development role that also carried the ESG remit, where his job included translating the climate challenge into the media business. It was there, he says, that he saw the gap that became his company: plenty of ambition around net zero targets, and none of the process, plan, governance or data technology that any other transformation programme in corporate life would take as standard.
He co-founded 51toCarbonZero in 2021 with technology at the centre, building a platform intended to make carbon data collection fast, repeatable, scalable and audit ready. The business is backed by Fuel Ventures as its main institutional investor and has offices in London and the US. By his account, data flows into the system from more than 56 markets, and customers span the ecosystem, from agencies including Havas and Horizon Media to advertising technology companies including Magnite and Equative and publishers including The Guardian. Davis also runs an annual survey of senior marketers, most recently 200 in Europe and the US, which he uses to track the gap between enterprise decarbonisation plans and what marketing departments are actually measured on.
Career21 years
- 2022 to now 51toCarbonZero Co-Founder and CEO
- 2012 to 2022 dentsu international Global Chief of Business Strategy and Transformation, Media and Global Clients
- 2009 to 2012 Clownfish (part of Aegis Media) Client and Project Manager
- 2006 to 2009 Carat (Dentsu Aegis Network) Consumer Insight and Media Consultant
Show earlier roles: GfK
- 2005 to 2006 GfK Junior Market Researcher
How Richard thinks3 convictions
-
Carbon flows down the chain
Davis treats decarbonisation as an ecosystem data problem rather than a company one. Because every supplier's footprint becomes someone else's supply chain emissions, he argues the industry only makes progress when the data moves across agencies, advertising technology companies and publishers together. His company's pitch is to connect those parties so the data flows across the ecosystem.
-
Sustainability as default brief
Davis wants sustainability normalised inside the creative brief instead of isolated in campaigns about sustainability. His test is whether the sustainable choice appears by default in the props, the vehicles and the production decisions of every piece of work. Once it is the norm, he argues, it becomes accepted and then desirable, which is the point at which behaviour changes.
-
Set the rules before competing
Davis sees a competitive industry learning, slowly, to behave pre-competitively. He credits bodies such as Ad Net Zero and the Advertising Association with getting rival players around one table to agree minimum standards, which he calls something of a first for advertising.
