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Now you can offset the carbon created by your creative.

New York Ad Agency Brooklyn Brothers claims to have just produced the first carbon neutral TV commercials.  But do they add up?

According to agency co-founder, Guy Barnett, the agency worked with UK resource management company ERM to calculate and offset the carbon produced for a TV campaign created for Versus TV Channel.

Here’s the math:

1. 15 TV commercials
2. Shot on location in Texas
3. 80 crew members
4. 40 vehicles
5. 10 flights
6. Extensive shoot production facilities
7. Hundreds of hours in post production editing

= 8.9 tons of carbon produced

Cost to offset? Just $20 per ton = $180

This sounds all very impressive until you get to the $180 part.  Can anyone tell me how the $180 offsets nearly 9 tons of carbon?  This seems like such a minimal cost for so much pollution. So I dug deeper.  ClimateCare.org is the organization that helped Brooklyn Brothers make their spots carbon neutral. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works.

So now all of us in the green advertising business need to consider how we can easily offset our creative carbon footprint. We probably don’t even have to do the calculation. Just budget an extra $200 into every production budget and get with organizations like ClimateCare.org to help us clean up our mess.

Have you ever consider the carbon footprint of your TV or photo shoot? If so, how’d you go about offsetting it?