It’s time to put media in service of nature

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This has long struck me as a particularly relevant quote for a sense of malaise that I’ve found commonplace within the advertising industry.

Ours is one that can easily take a cynical turn. We sell toothpaste, car insurance, phones; we sell tariffs, we sell chocolate bars, we sell airline tickets. We sell the dream! In moments of pressure and duress, in an attempt to ease the stress, we tell each other that we’re not saving lives. That, in other words, what we do as marketers isn’t that important. There is a self-flagellation about the worth of our efforts to do things that are meaningful, things that actually affect change for good.

Well, I have some good news: there is an antidote. It is called Media in Service of Nature (MISN), and last month Virgin Media O2 officially signed up. I genuinely believe it to be one of the most effective ways that we as an industry can make a real, tangibly positive difference in the world, irrespective of what we sell. It is an initiative that can make us collectively sit up a little straighter and give us back the spring in our step. If this sounds appealing, I urge you to read on.

So what is MISN? At its core it is a collaborative model, whereby brands, agencies, and media owners each contribute 0.1 per cent of their media spend into a collective fund. The fund then goes towards verified UK nature recovery projects run by Ecologi, a leading B Corp climate platform. The projects are varied and span the length and breadth of the UK. Said projects can also be tailored to the needs of individual businesses. For instance, Virgin Media O2 will be supporting projects that help restore biodiversity, support nature recovery, and increase climate resilience. And operationally, we have found MISON very easy to set up.

What’s powerful about this model – which giffgaff pioneered in a 2024 pilot programme – is its simplicity. Really, a small commitment – just 0.1 per cent – can become a meaningful mechanism for restoring habitats here in the UK. And the wider ambition for the movement is significant. MISN want to raise £200m by 2030 for UK nature recovery, akin to applying a 0.1 per cent nature levy across advertising in the UK. The funding aligns with and ladders up to the broader COP28 30x30 global agenda which the UK government has signed up to, and the government has already taken notice of our effort.

Though Virgin Media O2 formally entered the fray in July, we’ve been working hard in the background since January. When I first got involved, I didn’t appreciate the true scale of the challenge facing nature recovery. It is enormous, and none of us should pretend there is a single perfect answer. But that is exactly why this sort of innovation matters: we should be willing to test new approaches, including rethinking established systems – like the media supply chain – and ask ourselves how they can do more for us cooperatively, above and beyond the vagaries of individual business outcomes.

What makes MISN particularly exciting for us is that it builds on relationships we already value. At Virgin Media O2, we see this not as a superficial bolt-on but rather as an extension of the partnerships we have across our supply chain. And it’s a chance to turn strong commercial relationships into a shared effort with a tangible environmental impact. It’s also been so encouraging to see how this initiative has brought different disciplines together. One of the most positive things so far has been seeing marketing and sustainability teams work more closely together, and I’m hearing that similar conversations are now happening in partner organisations too.

We’ve made good early progress. Our media agency MG OMD has helped lead the charge, as well as a number of key media owners who have already signed up. Ahead lies a plethora of opportunities. Among other things, we’re starting a deeper engagement programme between all the organisations involved – a club of sorts – with the aim of getting out in nature together to see, support, and contribute to restoration work in a much more hands-on way. Hopefully MISON become part of how our industry works together.

MISN is a joined-up effort that will create something much bigger collectively than any of us could do alone. And if this initiative is truly going to scale, it will scale through an industry-wide partnership. All are welcome, (competitors included!) and so please take this as your invitation to join us and help make a true difference in the UK. It is something that we as marketers can all one day be proud of.

Johnny Winn is the head of advertising at Virgin Media O2