The power of media in driving sustainability

How media companies can responsibly use their power to drive positive change

The impact media content has on society is‌ its sustainability superpower. A newspaper’s coverage of racial justice could have a bigger impact on society than its own workforce policies; a broadcaster’s narrative on climate change could lead to greater carbon savings than its efforts to reduce its own emissions; a conference promoting circularity could have a bigger impact than the organiser’s efforts to recycle the waste created by the delegates. The key questions are: how could a media company ever understand this type of content impact? And how should a responsible company go about addressing them?

What makes a responsible media company?

Run by SLR, the Responsible Media Forum (RMF) is a partnership between 23 leading global media companies to identify and take action on the social and environmental challenges facing the sector. In 2025, the RMF published its latest report, ‘Measuring Content Impacts in the Media Sector’ [1], which explores how organisations might begin to quantify the impact a piece of content has, for example, to change views or influence behaviours.

Content has been at the heart of the RMF’s 20-year exploration of the question, ‘what makes a responsible media company?’. In 2013, the RMF published a report called ‘Mirrors or Movers’ [2], which first posed the question: does media content simply mirror society back at itself, or does it actively move and influence society? The report argued that media content does actively move society, whether that effect is intentional or not, and that media companies should manage this impact. In her foreword to the 2020 The Superpower of Media Report [3], Christiana Figueres (Founding Partner, Global Optimism and Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2010-2016)) proposed that it is culture, not science or politics, that is in the strongest position to close the gap between current efforts to limit climate change and what is needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.

How to measure the media's impact on sustainability issues

Whilst the majority of the media sector recognises the importance of content impact as a sustainability issue, measurement of this impact lags behind the more ‘traditional’ sustainability metrics, such as carbon emissions. In the latest RMF report, a survey of media professionals found that 92% of respondents believe that considering the societal impact when creating content is either very important or somewhat important (RMF, Measuring content impacts in the media sector, 2025). Despite this evident intention, the RMF has identified a stark measurement gap between the space that media companies dedicate to content in their sustainability reports, and the number of quantitative content-related KPIs. This pattern has been found in each repeat of the analysis in various reports since 2013, and most recently in the 2025 report.

The RMF believes this gap exists because there’s no clearly defined and agreed upon method for measuring content. The causal relationship between a piece of content and its impact is difficult to isolate from external factors (especially in a hyper-digitalised world where a piece of content can exist in many forms across multiple platforms), and there is a lack of resources available.

Within the media sector, advertising and broadcasters are making headway. Both groups have more access to data, like sales data, market prices, or audience viewing data from initatives like Barb (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board Ltd) - Barb runs a national panel on audience and household viewing habits. However, even these well-established industry methods face challenges. For example, audience panels can be self-selecting, which introduces bias, and a lot of advertising data is backward-looking and is based on the content medium’s (e.g., the TV channels’) distribution reach. This means the data can be patchy and will miss key groups, such as rural viewers or older audiences, who may not be as well-connected.

Over the last few years, brilliant examples have emerged of companies measuring content impact and quantifying the media’s superpower:

Whilst this nascent field has so far been driven by a desire to understand the positive impact of content, the topic is gathering pace with increases in regulatory pressure. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) puts an emphasis on companies disclosing their positive and negative impacts on the environment and society. For media companies, content is undeniably a key impact area, but without any sector-specific guidance, it’s unclear how it should be reported on.

The RMF has recently kicked off a new working group to take on this challenge. It will begin with a sector-wide double materiality exercise to identify which sustainability topics are the most pressing for the industry (building on its history of media materiality assessments [4]). It will then develop the conversation to explore how media companies might disclose on their biggest impact areas, such as content.

In short, content is one of, if not the, most powerful tool in the media sector’s responsibility ‘toolkit’. It has the power to drive change and inspire audiences, yet media companies are facing the challenge of how to showcase and measure the impact. This concept is also not limited to media: every product and service has a potential ripple effect and may inspire a consumer to think or act differently. Whilst content creation may be unique to media, there are parallels that could be drawn to all sectors. The RMF hopes to continue providing a valuable forum for sharing, learning and guiding the media sector to find answers, and inspiring those beyond media to think outside the box about their own products or services.

Advisory Digest

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References

[1] https://responsiblemediaforum.org/downloadDocumentFile?document=452

[2] https://responsiblemediaforum.org/downloadDocumentFile?document=142

[3] https://responsiblemediaforum.org/downloadDocumentFile?document=299

[4] https://responsiblemediaforum.org/downloadDocumentFile?document=359