WPP plc (WPP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody, and good afternoon. I'm Mark Read, the Chief Executive of WPP, and welcome to our first WPP investor event. The presentation for this meeting is going to be available on WPP's website. [Operator Instructions] So I'm going to be joined in today's session in person and virtually by a number of our colleagues from around the world. And our goal today is to share with you our strategy and purpose in ESG as well as our future plans. Now while this is our first ESG event, it's absolutely not our first work in this area. We're actually at this for close to 20 years. We produced our first -- we called it at the time, I think, sustainability report in 2002. We published our sustainability policy in 2006. And 3 years ago, we set out a new purpose for WPP that brings sustainability to the heart of everything that we do as a company. And I think that, that word "purpose" is increasingly important to us. And actually, purpose and sustainability and ESG are very much the same thing. I'll remind you that ESG stands for environmental, social and governance. And we really see that as the same as purpose, integral to why we exist as a company. And I think we want to make 4 key points today. The first is that WPP is at the heart of many of the sort of pressing issues that we face as a society: climate change, diversity, racial equity, privacy, data ethics, obesity. What we do as a business and the judgments we make are critically important. It's not something that can be added on to our business and that can exist in the sustainability department, if you like. It has to be integral to how we do business. The second point we'd like to stress is how important this is to our people. Ultimately, we are a people business, and our people want to know that they share the values of the company that they work for and the clients and brands that we work with. And so putting purpose at the heart of our business makes WPP a more attractive destination for people. And if we have the best people, then we'll do the best work. And that brings me naturally to the third point we want to make, which is around our clients, because this topic is increasingly critical to our clients. And they turn to us, to our agencies, our public relations and public affairs businesses, our advertising agencies, our media agencies, actually for advice and counsel on how to handle these issues. So we make recommendations to what they should do, but we also implement those recommendations and help them communicate the steps and actions that they're taking as companies. And that's increasingly important to us and for our business. And the last point I'd like to make is, as other companies have made is, we don't see there being a trade-off between sustainability or purpose and business performance. In fact, business performance and purpose are integrally joined together. And the more we behave in line with our purpose, which, by the way, has guided us critically through this COVID period over the last 16 or 17 months, the better our business will perform, we'll attract the best people, we'll do the best work for the best clients and ultimately, we'll deliver the best returns to our shareholders. I hope you see those points shine through the presentation today. I should start by asking you to read this cautionary statement and take that into account. Now how are we going to run through the points? So I'll give you a short overview of our purpose and how we bring that to life. And then Lindsay Pattison, our Chief Client Officer, will talk about what this means for clients and what we're doing clients. And then Jacqui Canney, our Chief People Officer; and Judy Jackson, our Global Head of Culture and Engagement, will talk about what this means for our people. After a short break, we'll come back and Hannah Harrison, our Director of Sustainability; and John Rogers, our Chief Financial Officer, will talk about the planet and what we do for the environment. Then I'll finish that section by talking about a lot of the work we do around communities. And then after a short break, we'll come back to talk about governance. It's increasingly important to make sure not just that we do this, so we -- but also we do what we say we do. And John will cover where we are on governance before we take Q&A -- take your questions at the end. [Operator Instructions] So turning to WPP's purpose. So we set out a new purpose, actually, the first time we'd explicitly laid out the purpose of WPP, 3 years ago. And that was to use the power of creativity to build better futures our people, our planet, our clients and communities. And I think the word "creativity" or this notion of the power of creativity is very important. It's what makes WPP distinct. And it's what makes our purpose distinct to WPP. And around it -- and a few months ago, we added the word "planet" to our purpose that we previously considered part of our communities but to make explicit that part of living our purpose. So let's bring that to life to you in this short film. [Presentation]

So thank you to AKQA for that fantastic film that highlights a lot of the work that we do with clients. And I think it's fair to say, you can see through that the work that we do at WPP shifts both beliefs and behaviors. And here are some examples of that work throughout the year, from the work we did for the Egg Board, "Go to work on an egg," a line written by Fay Weldon; to having Dave Prowse, the future Darth Vader, in the Green Cross Code, it's a big public education campaign. The work we do with corporate brands like Dove, where we changed the perception of beauty advertising; or KitKat that took the phrase, "Have a break, have a KitKat" into the national consciousness. And then lastly, work we do for nonprofits and companies and some work we did during the pandemic for Colgate, who made millions of soap bars that were handed out pro bono around the world to promote the World Health Organization's #SafeHands campaign. And I think what's important for WPP is the potential we have for significant impact, whether that's through our media business and the $60 billion in media that we invest or our clients who work with 325 of the Fortune 500, 61 of the FTSE 100. And our top clients, you can see, are very powerful and influential companies, all of whom are increasingly putting purpose at the heart of their work, if they're not doing that completely already. And that gives us great influence as an organization to, without being too wordy, make the world a better place or to bring our purpose to life. And in terms of sustainability, I think many of the ESG professionals would know that long-term business sustainability and client satisfaction are very inextricably linked. When you think about WPP as an investment and the sustainability of our business, very important that we drive client satisfaction. So working with those clients on the most critical issues like ESG is increasingly important. And you can see the progress that we've made over the last 3 years improving the Net Promoter Scores of our largest and most important client relationships. Now as I said in the introduction, we believe this is both right for us, it's morally right, and right for our business. So we know that consumers see that brands have 2.5x the brand value if they have a positive impact on society or 85% believe that brands should be something about more than just profit. And here are some other examples of work that we do: whether that's for Pfizer, communicating their role through the Science Will Win campaign in combating the virus; to Notpla, our fantastic piece of packaging work from Superunion that won the Grand Prix at Cannes last week; or the work that Keith Cartwright and his team in Los Angeles have been doing with Marc Pritchard and Procter & Gamble. And those companies all share the same belief that we do at WPP that doing the right thing is good for society and good for business. So let's just unpack our purpose, just one more stage, and talk about how it touches every element of WPP. In terms of our people, we have an ambition to become the employer of choice for all that talks to diversity and inclusion; in terms of the planet, maximize our positive impact on the planet through our commitments around net zero; to our clients, helping them to support and deliver their purpose; and lastly, the communities in which we all live, to build healthy and vibrant communities. And that general framework will underpin what we do as an organization and take you through the presentation today. Now no presentation on ESG will be complete, I've learned, without talking about rankings. So let's sort of see how WPP ranks. And I think we see today we have a clear leadership position. So this is Sustainalytics, which is a Morningstar company. I point out that lower risk is better. So the lower you are, the better you are. And to give you some context of the score, they look at the risk to your business in terms of the impact on the company's value from their ESG ranking. So 0 to 10 is negligible; 10 to 20 is low; 20 to 30, medium; 30 to 40, high; and 40-plus, severe. So WPP ranks about 12.5, so extremely well on the Sustainalytics rankings. We also have climate change rankings from the CDP, which is the Carbon Disclosure Project. They look at 8,400 companies, have done since 2002, and we rank as B on the Carbon Disclosure Project. And on the MSCI, again, they looked at ESG resilience, we're ranked AA. So their ranking go from AAA to CCC. So we're AA, one notch below AAA on the MSCI benchmarks. So I think we have a good position in the ESG rankings. I know that the ESG community overall is looking to do more to make sure that our investors can easily measure and understand our work in this area. I think one reason why we score well is that our strategy and purpose are fully aligned. If we look at the 5 key strategies we outlined in December 2018 around our vision, creativity, data, structure and culture, in each of those areas, we can talk to our purpose in terms of our vision, making sure sustainability is at the heart of our offer and our work with clients; in terms of our creative work, making sure that we market responsibly, that we do pro bono work; and with our teams, they're diverse and equitable; in terms of data and technology, following the best practice standards in terms of data privacy and data ethics. Our structure and our new simpler structure will help through lower-impact office space by being financially stronger and improving our governance and control. And probably most important is somewhat softer, the work that we do around people and culture, making sure we have shared values across our agencies and people, our clients and our supply chain. And you can see some of that culture work and some of the other recognitions that we've had, both from the Human Rights Campaign, to Bloomberg, to Hampton-Alexander, where we were ranked 10th out of the FTSE 100 in terms of women on Board. We've made significant progress there in terms of the level below Board in terms of gender diversity. So that's overall what we're trying to do. And our focus that I hope will come through today's presentation is around people, so improving diversity at every level, measured by gender, race, age, disability or sexual orientation; and building an inclusive culture where people feel that they belong and can do their best work. In terms of the planet, our focus is on engaging our supply chain and strengthening our Scope 3 carbon data quality, ultimately making our overall Scope 3 net zero goal; our work with clients around ESG and team diversity. And lastly, our work from communities around building global partnerships, one of the biggest challenges, as well as empowering people locally to pursue their passions. So that's what we're trying to do overall. We'll now take you through each of those sections. And perhaps counterintuitively, we won't start in this order, but we'll start with clients. And Lindsay Pattison, our Chief Client Officer, will take you through what ESG means to our clients and the work we're doing in that area. So Lindsay, over to you.

Thanks very much, Mark. So I'm going to talk in general about why this matters to our clients, talk about our offer in this space and then get to showing you some amazing work. So ESG is vital to our clients' success. Why? Well, it really matters to consumers. 95% of people believe that brands are responsible for their environmental concerns, almost as high as the responsibility placed on governments. And of course, consumers will vote with their wallets. 81% say they expect to buy more sustainable products over the next 5 years. So it's a clear business opportunity. It's key to talent acquisition, as Mark said, and employee retention. And this also, of course, affects business performance, and Jacqui will speak more to this later. But research from Forbes tells us that 83% of employees are more loyal to a company that helps them contribute to social and environmental issues. And it's key for business growth, and that's why we're all here. As we know from Kantar Research, brands with high ESG scores from our BrandZ study grew 2.5x faster than their peers. And there's a ton of external research, notably from McKinsey, Catalyst but many others on why diversity matters. Companies with diverse workforces are more likely to financially outperform their peers by almost 25% and shows 19% higher revenues on average due to greater levels of innovation that come from having more diversity. Sustainability is now a key decision-maker when clients choose their partners. We conducted our own research last month amongst some of our own top marketeers. 89% say diversity among their agency team is important when choosing who to partner with. It's beyond a nice-to-have or a moral imperative, and it's often a contractual requisite. 76% of our top clients agree that the commitment of agency partners to the ESG goals is important when they decide who to partner with. But actually, only 32% are clear on what those commitments are. So we can do a better job of articulating that with clients, starting here today. 80% say the commitment of their agency partners to ESG has become more important when deciding who to partner with. So this is an upward trend, and we expect it to increase even more. For WPP, as for our clients, doing good is good business. The truth is clients need marketing to help build a more sustainable future. There is a core challenge for almost all of our clients, closing the so-called value-action gap, the gap between people's personal and cultural values and their actions. Closing the value-action gap has been described as the holy grail in overcoming barriers to sustainable consumption. While shifts in policy and industry transformation can take decades to realize, behavioral change takes hold much faster, as we've seen during the COVID pandemic. So closing this gap represents a huge commercial opportunity. And so our work transcends from strategic, built from deep understanding of consumers and insight, which in most often turns into execution and activation. And with over 105,000 colleagues all over the world, doing this with WPP means our clients can do this at scale. As Mark has said, not only do our own actions change the future as WPP, but also at scale, our work with clients. We can drive macro change, helping build a more sustainable future and a more inclusive world. Centrally, part of my role is to ensure we create thought leadership and best-in-class client examples of work. 3 months ago, we created the sustainability playbook to ensure WPP uses our resource and expertise to positively change consumer behavior and deliver the UN's SDGs. Last year, we created an inclusivity playbook to ensure we not only use our voice to fight racism or stereotypes of any kind but also more positively ensure we acknowledge, honor and celebrate inclusivity and diversity. And at more fundamental level, centrally, we also ensure that our client leads are aware of our own code of conduct. We make clear that we will not take on work or produce content that is intentionally designed or intended to mislead. We also work hard to ensure that all of our people are kept abreast of changes to advertising regulations, the latest being HFSS in the U.K. earlier this week. And our legal team are really closely connected to our community of leaders. The services we offer are in high demand. There's a huge breadth of WPP capabilities in this space, from strategy and consulting, to delivery and flawless execution. And these capabilities deliver against multiple audiences and multiple stakeholder priorities. Last week, in Cannes, I'll quickly call out 3 Grand Prix winners in 2 very different areas. Firstly, a Titanium Grand Prix for Telenor with work by Ogilvy in the mobile category, using technology to help reduce inequalities in Pakistan, leapfrogging outdated paper-based processes with a simple mobile app, giving digital birth registration, enabling over 1 million previously invisible children to have an official identity. And secondly, 2 Grand Prix wins in design. AKQA has work with H&M called the Looop, it's a pioneering in-store recycling system designed to inspire a more sustainable approach to clothing amongst consumers. And one for Superunion that Mark referenced earlier for Notpla, a new brand whose mission is to make packaging as we know it disappear naturally with a sustainable alternative to single-use plastic packaging. The name Notpla is literally an abbreviated form of not plastic, you can probably guess. And their beautifully designed packaging is as transparent and ephemeral a vessel as the product itself is. In fact, demand is off the scale. 9 of our top 10 clients work with us in this space. I counted up and my team did, we have over 200 work streams with those top 10 clients right now in ESG. If we look at some of our agencies, 25% of production last year in 2020 was produced virtually by Hogarth, and that's up from 5% in 2019. 25% of Superunion sales last year were ESG-related. And 100% of briefs received now into H&K in the U.S. and the U.K. now mention ESG, and a 150% increase in ESG biddings were seen by Cartwright in 2020. So let's see some work, and we're going to start actually with Cartwright, one of our brilliant agencies, with some work for P&G. So first up, a powerful example of using communication to shift opinion and change behavior in the fight against racial injustice. This is a piece of work called The Choice for P&G by Grey and Cartwright. And as Marc Pritchard said, as he commented on it, "The brutal reality of systemic racism was laid bare by George Floyd's murder, and we could no longer be ignored or set aside." And this work is part of P&G's longstanding antiracism program. It received 528 million impressions in the first 20 days. We're truly proud to create content like this for a business like P&G. And I'll hand over to Keith to tell you more.

The Choice was a part of Procter & Gamble's talk about bias platform. We created The Choice on a really simple notion: you were either for or against the movement that was going on at that time in our country and around the world. You're either racist or anti-racist. The backdrop of the spot was one of the simplest things that, unfortunately, divides us, and that's skin, melanin. We put black and white skin on display, and we had a conversation with the world about allyship and the importance of allyship. It was a call to action and a way for you to jump in, but all in all, it was a way for us to have a conversation with you during one of the most important movements of our lifetime. [Presentation]

Our next piece of work also won a Grand Prix last week in Cannes, and it showcases some inclusive product design, which is a huge growth opportunity for us. It's work we're less well known for, but we have tremendous credibility in this space. 1 billion people or 15% of the world's population experience some form of disability. And despite their spending power, products and experiences are still not designed with this community in mind. We partnered with Unilever and a community of people with disabilities to co-create the world's first inclusive deodorant. I'll hand over to the amazing Christina from Wunderman Thompson to tell us more.

Hi. My name is Christina Mallon, and I'm a disabled inclusive designer at Wunderman Thompson. We believe that experiences that we create on behalf of our clients should reflect the diversity of the world. Our client, Unilever, is the top seller of deodorants in the world. So we proactively pitched them an idea of how we can create the most inclusive deodorant experience ever. Every deodorant user becomes disabled at some point in their life. Like me, I became disabled at age 21. So we got together our customer experience practitioners and employees with disabilities to understand the pain points of the deodorant experience. Once identified, we co-collaborated with designers, occupational therapists, psychotherapists and engineers and the disability community to create innovative deodorant solutions. Come check out our case study. [Presentation]

Next up, this is the first of 2 examples tackling social injustice in the U.K. but with themes that resonate globally. Aldi and one of our brilliant PR, our owned plus agency, BCW, partnered with Marcus Rashford to show us how applying a creative solution drives engagement and triggers that behavioral change. You'll see a beautifully simple and purposeful animation, which drove over 2 million free meal donations, 600 pieces of media coverage in 24 hours. And it really drove Aldi's brand strength, which we know ultimately drives business growth. I'll hand over to Rebecca to tell you more.

Hi. My name is Rebecca Grant. Hi. My name is Rebecca Grant, and I'm the U.K. CEO of BCW. And I'm so proud to be talking to you today about our work in partnership with Aldi to tackle food poverty in the U.K. I hope like me that you've never experienced true hunger, but shockingly, 1 in 5 British children are living in food poverty today. We wanted to inspire the British public and move them to take action and do something to change that. So how are we going to do that? For us, it came down to 2 key ingredients. One was partnering with an authentic voice, and we were so proud to enlist the support of Marcus Rashford, who, unpaid, joined us because he believed in the idea. And second was the idea itself. We created an animation that personified hunger. It showed hunger as an imaginary friend, which revealed to people like me what it was like to live on a day-to-day basis feeling hungry. [Presentation]

Some fantastic work for something that's crucial that many of us had no idea was so bad in a market like the U.K. And finally, our latest work with HSBC also looking at inequity in society, but this time tackling financial issues. So touching on a very important and very specific social issue. And I think we'd all acknowledge how powerful the insight is. Over to Joe, who will tell us more about the work and its effectiveness.

Hello. My name is Joe Petyan. I'm the WPP Global Client Leader for HSBC. I wanted to share today some work with you in the U.K., some work that HSBC and ourselves are doing specifically around the issue of homelessness. There are 288,000 homeless people in the U.K., unbelievably. And we've done some amazing work in bus shelters up and down the U.K. to dramatize this problem through the illusion of somebody sleeping rough in a bus shelter with HSBC's messaging surrounding this. The work has just picked up 2 Gold Cannes Lions this week. And more importantly, we're seeing some fantastic community-based measurement scores going up for HSBC and a 52% uplift in no-fixed-abode accounts that are being taken up. Equally interesting is an initiative we've got that has resulted in a film called Vicious Circle that debuted recently on Channel 4. It's an incredibly creative piece that shows that without a home, you can't have a bank account; and without a bank account, you can't get a home. And this vicious circle is something that we and HSBC are trying to break. I hope you enjoy the work. [Presentation]

Some fantastic work there, and that work deliberately makes you feel stressed about that Vicious Cycle that people get into. We have many more examples we could have chosen from, but we picked up those today. I'm going to hand over now to Jacqui Canney, our Chief People Officer at WPP, who will talk to you about our people strategy and goals.

As Mark said, WPP's purpose to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities sustains our culture. How we activate that culture and fulfill our purpose starts with our people. When we look at our company today, we have many great strengths, including our 100,000-plus people all around the world. During this tumultuous year, they demonstrated their resilience, talent and creativity even as we shifted to remote work. I'm proud of how our people have taken care of each other, but also our clients and communities. In addition to the challenges the pandemic has posed for our people, it is impossible to ignore the impact that the global racial justice movement has had on our company, our people and our industry. In the U.S., but also in other parts of the world, companies have had to reckon with that impact and ask themselves hard questions about where they stand, what they should say and what they should do. We have the scale and power to influence change, not just within our company but within our industry and beyond, and I am proud of where WPP has come out on those questions. Judy and I will talk more a bit later about the racial equity commitments we've made in June of last year. I will turn now to our people strategy and how that has evolved to meet the times we are living in now. The simple question that has guided our strategy is how do we attract, retain and grow the most talented, most creative and most inspired people on the planet who are drawn to our purpose. We know that the best, most creative people place huge value on culture and purpose. They want to do work that they are proud of, as do all of us. So making sure that we are thinking about our purpose and how that shows up in our work is critical to ensuring that WPP is an employer of choice, which has been 1 of the 3 pillars of our people strategy. The events of the past year caused us to take a hard look at our people strategy. We asked ourselves, are we doing enough to build a company and a culture that is open to all and where each and every colleague can grow and thrive? Of course, the answer is that there is always going to be more we can do. So last year, we very intentionally doubled down on the first pillar of our people strategy: being an employer of choice for all. When it comes to attracting talent to WPP, we know we need to be constantly doing more to welcome different voices and different perspectives to WPP, not only because it's the right thing to do but because it makes our work better. We also recognize that we need to do all we can to retain our people, especially our colleagues who look around the room and don't see many people who look like them or think like them. A big part of this is listening to our own people, tell us what they feel and what they need. And lastly, we know we need to continue to focus on how we are growing and developing our people. After the year we've had, we know that investing in our people and their capabilities will be the key to success as a company. Let me give you some specific examples of what we are doing in each of these areas. Last year, recognizing the impact the pandemic would have on early-career talent at a time when office-based programs were impossible, we launched our NextGen Leaders Series in partnership with colleges, universities and organizations with the aim of reaching a diverse pool of young people. About 850 participants, of which more than half were people of color and more than 60% were women, completed the 10-week virtual learning series. Because NextGen was so successful, we have expanded it, and this year, we will have over 1,400 people join us from over 60 countries. Again, we worked hard to ensure the same level of diversity among the participants. Partnering with organizations like The One Club for Creativity and The LAGRANT Foundation, we've intentionally focused on building an early talent pipeline of the best diverse talent, which will ultimately help us build teams with diverse perspectives, producing richer work for our clients. To be the employer of choice for all, we must listen closely to our people. We launched our first quarterly Pulse survey in Q1 this year, which included an inclusion index designed to gauge our employee's sense of belonging. Our Q2 Pulse went to 109 markets and was translated into 22 languages. Despite it being so new, we've seen tremendous engagement with more than 43,000 participants. We are already finding our Pulse survey to be an invaluable tool for better understanding sentiment and, most importantly, which areas we need to focus on to ensure we are meeting the needs of our people. The other thing we have learned from the past year is that we not only need to listen more, we also need to create more spaces for discussion across the company about the issues that matter to our people. Last year, Judy launched Safe Room series, creating spaces for our people to come together, share their experiences and process events happening in the world around us. Thousands of people across the company have attended and engaged in these sessions led by our senior leadership. The feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive. One of the things we know from listening to our people is that something they increasingly want is greater mobility across our network. It's one of the most powerful things WPP has to offer our people, an endless career path across some of the most exciting and innovative companies in the world. As a result, we launched our new Career Explorer platform earlier this year. Career Explorer aggregates all jobs across the WPP network in one searchable place, giving people more opportunities for exciting and fulfilling careers. We've already seen the impact. Since the launch of Career Explorer, there have been around 22,000 roles posted. In total, those roles have nearly 70,000 views and almost 10,000 applications, helping our people find new opportunities and helping us to retain some of our best talent. Another thing we know our people are eager for is greater access to leadership development programs focused on building the skills they need if we're going to match our capabilities to our business strategy. Importantly, as we move to a more flexible hybrid working model, we need to make sure that our managers understand how to create an inclusive environment where all our people can flourish. With this in mind, in partnership with one of our companies, UniWorld, we are launching a new inclusive manager learning program that will provide real-time experiential learning as well as an on-demand learning so people can learn at times that work for them. We want to make sure our managers have the tools to be the best, most inclusive leaders they can be with 3 key goals: drive better decision-making, nurturing an inclusive work environment for their teams and embedding a culture of continuous growth. We are launching our inclusive manager pilot at corporate later this year, and we will be expanding it more broadly after that, learning and iterating as we understand the impacts of new ways of working in a post-COVID world. In order to attract, retain and grow the best talent, we need to be the place that celebrates diversity and difference, so our people can bring their best selves to work every day and feel a deep sense of belonging at WPP. We must also demonstrate our purpose every day, from the sustainability work we do, to our investment [ in ] community partnerships, from our commitments to racial justice, to our focus on gender equality at all levels. In June last year, Mark, along with the CEOs of our operating companies, took a visible stand on the issue of racial equity and supporting underrepresented ethnic talent. I'm going to turn it over to Judy Jackson, WPP's Global Head of Culture and Engagement, to talk about our racial equity commitments and the work we are doing to meet them.

Thank you, Jacqui. As Jacqui said, at WPP, we have the scale and power to influence change not just within our company but within our industry and beyond. In June of last year, we committed to 3 things to advance racial justice. The first is taking decisive action on each of the 12 points in the Call For Change letter to our industry for more than 1,200 black advertising professionals. The second is using the power of our voice to advance the cause of racial equity. And the third is investing $30 million over 3 years to fund inclusion programs at WPP and support external organizations. I am very proud of the public stand that Mark and our leaders are taking. Racism is just not the black community's problem or the Asian community's problem or any single community's problem. It's everyone's problem. The challenge of addressing racial inequity requires all hands on deck to make the world a better place for everyone. One of the immediate steps we took to fulfill our June 2020 commitments was to establish our first Global Inclusion Council with the members drawn from around the world to help advise and guide WPP. We're going to hear from some of them now.

Unite North America is a new organization that supports LGBT employees across all WPP companies. One of the benefits of Unite is that it helps to support LGBT employees at our agencies that may be too small to organize themselves. Unite also helps to foster greater connection and collaboration across our agencies. One great example is we are now using our strategic and creative talent across multiple WPP agencies to partner with the Human Rights Campaign to help pass the Equality Act and ensure that LGBT Americans can live lives free from discrimination. We are enormously proud of this work.

Diversity, equity and inclusion often means very different things in different regions and countries, and sometimes, even within countries. Therefore, DE&I efforts need to be adjusted to the local context. We need to find the right diversity dimensions that are important and relevant in each specific country. There may be an age diversity issue or we may need teams with mixed nationalities in some locations. We absolutely strive for consistency in HR policies across the region while, at the same time, supporting policies that respect different cultures and traditions.

As a disabled designer, I've been able to thrive at work because of the inclusive culture at Wunderman Thompson. My clients and colleagues value my perspective given that I will look at the world through a different lens because of my lived experience as a disabled person. We are so committed to inclusion that we created the first inclusive design practice by a mid- to large-sized agency. We help clients like Microsoft, Tommy Hilfiger, Unilever create products and communications that are not ableist, racist or have gender bias.

One of the most important things we have learned since we made our racial equity commitments is how important it is to be transparent with our own people about the work we are doing to meet our commitments but also the challenges we face. We are confident we can achieve this because of the great progress we have made on driving gender equality. Women now represent 51% of our senior managers. At the most senior executive level, this figure is 40%, up from 37% in 2019. And we've increased the proportion of women on our Board to 43%, with an aim to achieve parity. While we're cautiously optimistic about the fact that we have made progress towards becoming more diverse across WPP in the U.S., we know we still have a long way to go and that our progress is not happening as quickly as anyone would like. But ultimately, we are committed to transparency and to holding ourselves accountable by making our data public. We also recognize, looking at our data, that we have to put our heads down, continue the hard work we've committed to and dig in for the long haul if we're going to improve diversity representation at all levels of WPP. In addition to publishing our data, we've made foundational progress on each of our other commitments. A few weeks ago, Mark and I hosted a panel session to reflect on the past year, the progress we've made and what inclusion at WPP looks like moving forward. I'd like to share with you this film we shared with our people during that session. [Presentation]

While I'm proud of the progress we've made, we're approaching the challenges that we face with our eyes wide open. Our work to ensure our $30 million commitment has made impact is ongoing. Over the past year, we've continued to increase our investment in inclusion programs within WPP. We've also hired a Racial Equity Program Director, Stacie Graham, to create a framework designed to ensure that our investment in partnerships with external organizations are thoughtful and measurable, driving change in our company, in our industry and in the world. When I look at the work that our agencies are putting out in the world, work that tackles tough issues, I feel inspired by how WPP can really use its voice for good. Our people are amazing. They inspire me and, I think, each other to continue to envision a better, more equitable future for all of us.

Thanks, Judy, and thank you for all you do. I'd like to end with talking about accountability. We recognize that words without accountability are just words. And we are committed to holding ourselves accountable by taking several specific steps. This year, for the first time, we've incorporated progress against our commitments into our senior leaders' bonus compensation schemes for 2021. Similarly, just as we are doing quarterly financial reviews, we are doing reviews with all our senior leaders to ensure we are on track and making progress against our diversity, equity and inclusion goals. And we are making sure we update our whole company on progress across our DE&I work on a quarterly basis so that they can see where we are and continue to challenge us and hold us accountable. While we're currently focused on the rollout of our new data systems to improve how we collect and report our people's data, in the next 12 to 18 months, we will set out more specific goals for a diverse workforce and a continued road map for how we will achieve that. Just as I'm inspired by the creativity of our people across WPP, I'm inspired by the way in which our people are pushing us to do better. This month is Pride Month and it coincides with the launch of Unite, WPP's first global cross-agency LGBTQ+ employee resource group. Unite has been an effort spearheaded by our people, and it's just one of the many ways our people are helping to lead the way towards a more inclusive future for our company. I could not be prouder. So coming full circle. I think if there's anything we've learned from this unexpected year it's that investing in our people will drive our growth and value as a company. To that end, nothing is more important than fostering an inclusive culture and being a place where the best, most creative talent will come to work and stay, all because we offer them an experience of endless discovery and a deep sense of belonging and purpose. We have more work to do as we move from 2021 into 2022, but we are proud of what we have achieved. We're excited to continue building our culture, fulfilling our purpose and helping all our people grow and thrive.

Thanks so much, Jacqui and Judy. Now before we present our next section on Planet, we're going to take just a 5-minute coffee break. Please take an exit. We'll be back in 5 minutes with our Sustainability Director, Hannah Harrison; and our WPP CFO, John Rogers. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back, everyone. We're now going to take a look at WPP's impact on the environment. We've actually got 2 big areas of focus at WPP: the circular economy and climate change. And today, we're going to focus on climate change, which in our materiality assessment is identified as the second most material ESG issue for our business. As you can see, we've been managing our direct carbon footprint for 15 years. During that time, we've delivered consistent carbon reductions driven by targets and embedded in our wider transformation program, which I'll talk more about later on. We've also aimed to be transparent and report against our progress. For example, we participated in CDP since 2006 and became an early adopter of TCFD reporting in 2018. But we know we all need to accelerate the pace of change. And that's why we've amended our purpose statement to make it explicit that our commitment to the planet is integral to our business. So coming on now to our carbon footprint. Our scope 1 and 2 emissions, which we've been managing since 2006, actually make up less than 2% of our footprint. The vast majority, over 98%, is scope 3. And in total, our emissions in 2019 were 5.4 million tonnes of CO2. So to put that in context, that's about half of Microsoft's footprint or equivalent to the emissions of Uganda. So what's our response? We're reducing our own emissions over which we have direct control, continues to be a priority. We've committed to reach net-zero emissions across our own operations by 2025. And a much bigger stretch, we've also committed to reach net-zero emissions across our entire value chain by 2030, including emissions from media buying, an industry first. Before I hand over to our Sustainability Director, Hannah, let's watch a film about our net-zero commitments. [Presentation]

Thanks, John. Our net-zero commitments are backed by equally ambitious science-based reduction targets, which we heard just this morning have been verified by the Science Based Target initiative. We aim to reduce our absolute scope 1 and 2 emissions by at least 84% by 2025 from a 2019 base year. And we aim to halve our scope 3 emissions by 2030, also off a 2019 base, in line with the UNFCCC's requirements to limit warming to 1.5 degrees and the ambitions of the Race To Zero campaign, of which we're a signatory. Residual emissions will be offset through the purchase of high-quality offsets to meet our net-zero targets. So how will we get there? We will reduce emissions across our business first and go as far and as quickly as possible. Reaching 100% renewable electricity by 2025 will remove 71% of our owned emissions, and we're already making good progress. In 2020, we sourced 65% of the electricity we use from renewable sources, reaching 100% in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the majority of our European markets. And by shifting more than half of our car fleet to electric or hybrid vehicles and by integrating carbon reduction into campus design, for example, by installing smart meters as standard, we believe we can reduce emissions by 84% by 2025. We've also identified the largest emissions hotspots in our value chain so that we know where to focus our efforts. Just over half of our scope 3 emissions come from our media buying. That's why we've included the emissions from the advertising that we place on media platforms on behalf of our clients in our commitments. And this is not an easy challenge to take on. Just quantifying the emissions associated with a banner or a YouTube video is incredibly difficult. Improving data quality and carbon accounting for media investment is an area of particular priority for us. We are responsible, though, for more than $60 billion in media spend annually. And by taking this on, we hope to shift the whole media advertising ecosystem and partner with our vendors to reduce emissions at scale. In a moment, John will share in more detail about how we're embedding carbon reduction in our wider transformation strategy to reduce emissions from technology, business travel and procurement. But first, let's take a look at how our net-zero commitments are driving innovation and already delivering competitive advantage across our business. We'll now hear from Mark Patterson, Chief Operating Officer at GroupM; and Richard Glasson, CEO of Hogarth Worldwide, on their plans to reach net zero.

Our vision at GroupM is to be responsible for shaping the next era of media where advertising works better for people. And by people, we mean clients, employees, our partners, but also the wider global community. We've developed a 5-pillar responsible media investment framework to tackle this that encompasses brand safety, data ethics, diversity, equity inclusion, responsible journalism and finally sustainability. And in this area of sustainability, we're focused on establishing a net-zero media supply chain by 2030. There are 3 key things here that we're focused on in achieving this goal: to develop an industry-leading carbon measurement methodology for media; to collaborate with and influence behaviors in our media supply chain; and finally, to educate and inform and enable change both within GroupM but also our industry as a whole. So we have a team in GroupM working hand in hand with our colleagues in WPP. I'm really trying to validate and assess the current data capture methodologies and calculators, work with an external partner to try and agree on accepted best-in-class approach. We're going to build a tool to integrate this into our own systems as well as vendor RFI systems. And we're going to work with the platforms and publishers on best practice and GroupM standards. And finally, create a communications plan and training approach for our staff, so they really understand the issue. And we can use the tools and really engage with clients and vendors. We calculate and estimate that the media supply chain accounts for about 50% of WPP's total carbon footprint. And we're increasingly seeing clients asking questions about a specific media partner carbon footprints when assessing and investing and making decisions about how to allocate media funds. And we see this trend increasing in the future.

The best work has purpose at its heart, making diversity, accessibility and sustainability central to how we operate means our work is more relevant, engaging and effective. Values and performance were intrinsically linked because our business is fundamentally about connecting visually with consumers and communities. By changing how we make work, we can make a significant reduction in the environmental impact of our activity and, at the same time, create work which drives stronger responses. Sustainably made this into product is a mindset, which prevails everything we do and which exemplifies the values we bring to all the work we create for our clients. [Presentation]

It's important to note that our net-zero commitments are integral to our wider transformation strategy across our campuses, investment in technology, our operating model and very importantly within procurement, which is where most of our scope 3 emissions originate. So taking a look at our campus strategy. By 2025, 85% of our people will work in net-zero campuses powered by renewable electricity, which as Hannah has just shown is critical to meeting our targets. But we're looking, of course, beyond renewable electricity. We've embedded sustainability into campus design. We're factoring climate risk into our site location assessment to designing offices to be adaptable, reducing waste from fit-outs and updating iconic buildings to be future-fit. So for example, at our new campus down the road at 1 Southwark Bridge in London, we expect to save around 115 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year through a combination of all electric heating and cooling, not natural gas, a high-performance facade and passive solar shading. That's a predicted 40% regulated CO2 emission savings. Next, let's look at technology. We're using technology to reduce campus emissions. We estimate smart building and cooling management solutions could reduce campus technology emissions by 28%. And moving 95% of our workflow to public cloud could reduce emissions from storage and computing by 60%. So coming on now to our operating model. Moving from smaller offices to fewer, larger, more efficient buildings, which comply with internationally recognized sustainable building standards, reduces energy use by around 21% per location. And permanently reducing air travel by around 1/3 versus 2019 levels will lower both costs and emissions. Net-net, we expect these investments to drive cost out of the business. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps the most significant opportunity is through procurement. Our procurement transformation program will introduce new ways of working and embed sustainability by design, helping us to optimize cost savings, environmental requirements and social priorities, including diversity. Today, we've launched an accelerated program in partnership with Unilever, Google, Dow and MSD U.K., an organization that champions supply chain diversity to our ethnic minority-owned businesses with the networks, the training and skill set to help them grow and succeed. In turn, this will help us create a more inclusive supply chain, bringing diversity of ideas and perspectives into WPP. At the same time, our procurement transformation will enable quicker vetting and intelligent risk management. And we've already incorporated carbon emissions questions into our supplier onboarding process. But through our procurement transformation, we'll be able to collate master supplier data on a single platform to track the impact our buying has on the environment, including measurement and monitoring across scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. I'll now hand over to Mark to introduce how we are using the power of creativity and our voice to support our communities.

Great. And thank you, John. So the last element of our purpose is communities, which talks to, as John said, how to use the power of creativity to contribute to society, building healthy and vibrant communities. Now given our global scale and that of our clients, WPP is in a unique position to make a difference in this area. So let's start by looking at some of the quantitative measures of our impact and our work. First, we've estimated the total value of our impact across pro bono work, charitable donations and free media over GBP 600 million in 2020. And if we look at how we delivered that impact, it's made up of GBP 12.6 million in pro bono work across our agencies and some GBP 59.3 million in free media space that we worked with GroupM and our media owners to unlock for good causes. And on top of this, as we mentioned in our People section, we've committed $30 million over the next 3 years to fund racial inclusion programs across WPP internally as well as to support external organizations and initiatives. So these metrics capture our work across both global causes and partnerships as well as local work done by our agencies around the world, some 2/3 of whom also organize regular annual volunteering days. Now to bring this to life, I've asked 4 of my colleagues to share short case studies. The first highlights our work with the United Nations, where we've been helping them to use bold, creative, innovative ideas to reach a broader audience and mobile citizens in a number of areas, including the UN Women, but also specifically around climate change. And Ashley Allen is joined by Ovais Sarmad, the Deputy Executive Director of the UNFCCC to discuss our client work in this short case study.

Welcome to Ovais Sarmad, who is the Deputy Executive Director of the UNFCCC. Thank you for joining us today. We've been working together for several years now. And obviously, working with partners is very important for the United Nations. What makes the WPP partnership different?

The WPP-UNFCCC partnership is really very important and strategic for us. It started off with a very daring and innovative initiative that we launched a few years ago in addressing the existential threat that we are all -- the whole world is facing, that is climate change. And the launching of the People's Seat initiative at that time was very well received. We've reached more than 1 billion people around the world. So that made it very momentous and extremely meaningful. And we're very, very pleased with that initiative that happened some years ago. And since then, that momentum has caught up. So it really is a truly meaningful partnership where we understand what WPP is able to offer. And we believe also that WPP understood what our needs were at that time and very cleverly designed that initiative and launched it and worked with us hand in hand. So extremely meaningful. We value that partnership very much.

So at the start of the pandemic, we offered the World Health Organization the full resources of WPP on a pro bono basis to do all we could to help to combat the spread of the virus. And we partnered with the World Health Organization and the WHO Foundation now for some 15 months. Ovais and Ashley will share how we've leveraged our global scale as well as local knowledge to help the WHO reach people with vital health communications.

Over the last year, WPP has been providing pro bono support to the WHO and the WHO Foundation. Critical to these organizations' fight against the pandemic has been communication, the dissemination of global public health messages. And critical to our ability to do this effectively was leveraging our global scale to deliver locally and to all. Our core cross-agency team, GroupM and Wavemaker, with production from Hogarth Worldwide, led work for 167 countries in more than 20 languages and secured in excess of $46 million in pro bono media. But while in the early days of the pandemic there was solidarity in the global experience and in the messages people needed to hear, "Wash your hands, stay inside," there was no one media that could reach everyone. And this is where our global local approach was key. GroupM worked to secure media inventory and worked closely with Wavemaker to determine where and how to deploy for maximum impact. Our creative agency, Grey, Ogilvy, Scangroup would then work with Hogarth to produce relevant content for a local WPP media agency to deliver. This media-first approach allowed us to create made-for-market campaigns, and this in turn allowed us to reach tens of millions of people. For example, the Weibo campaign reached over 300 million people in China. In Africa, telco partners sent out more than 2 million public health SMS messages every day. And in Western markets, TV and digital connected with hundreds of millions. Our work continues. We support the WHO Foundation with their vaccine fundraising initiative. The days of the shared experience are over. As some countries are looking forward to the easing of lockdown, the pandemic rages on in many others as they face a long wait for the vaccine. This inequity needs to be cured, and we'll soon be live with a global appeal to end the pandemic for just $5 watch this space. We are incredibly proud of the work we have been able to do. The WHO team told us that our partnerships with them have transformed the way they work. Dr. Tedros said he is proud to work with WPP, that we are good people. It's this we'll keep in mind as our partnership continues.

So as we know, the pandemic hit India particularly hard earlier this year. And we at WPP have a long-established business there with some 8,000 people as well as an existing WPP Foundation. And Srini, our WPP Lead in India, will share how we've mobilized our resources at a very difficult time in his country.

Hello and namaste from India. I am CVL Srinivas, WPP Country Manager. We've been able to support our people and our communities right through this pandemic, thanks to the existing partnerships of the WPP India Foundation and the support we have got from WPP Global. Last year, the 2 communities that were most severely impacted were the migrants and the health care workers. We were able to channelize our contributions through the WPP India Foundation, and by working with partners like SBI and India 2022, managed to reach out to these communities that were most in need of help. This year, the pandemic hit home much harder. A lot of our people and their families were very badly affected. But with the timely help of WPP Global and with the setting of the COVID relief fund, we were able to support our people right through this terrible period. We set up services like teleconsulting, ambulance-on-call, organized oxygen concentrators across different cities for our people and even kicked off a vaccination drive for all our people and their families across all the cities in India we operate in. And going beyond this, once again, with WPP India Foundation and its partner ecosystem, we were able to sustain channelized contributions from across different WPP offices globally and reached out to these communities via our partners like Magic Bus, Learning Links, Americas Foundation and others. Thank you.

I'm pleased to say that after a few very difficult months, the situation is now much better in India. And I'm very proud of the difference that Srini and the other leaders and all of our people in India have made. So these films highlight our global partnerships, but we also encourage our people to support many smaller, more local causes, causes they feel passionate about, from biodiversity to racial equity, from cancer research to mental health. And this final film takes one such cause, showing our ability to use creativity to change behavior. It comes with a warning that is a powerful film and some of you may find it upsetting, but it's this power that makes it an effective piece of communications. So we share that work of Michael Houston, the CEO of Grey, the agency that produced the film, will add some context to the film at the end. We'll then go straight from that to a 5-minute break before coming back in to talk about our work in the area of governance. [Presentation]

As a father of a 6-year old, I find that film to be extremely haunting. But perhaps what's even more haunting are some of the statistics around gun violence in the United States. So for starters, there are more guns in America than there are people. It's insane. Think about that statistic for a second. And unfortunately, 2021 is on pace to become the deadliest year for deaths due to gun violence in decades. So far this year, we've had 20,000 -- over 20,000 actually, deaths due to gun violence, which is about, on average, 120 per day and includes 274 mass shootings. Our client, States United to Prevent Gun Violence, has a very clear and simple mission: to eliminate the threat of gun violence rather than to advocate more broadly for gun control. As you might imagine, in 2020, amid social unrest and coronavirus fears, America's appetite for guns only increased. Sales were surging. Unfortunately, at the same time, we had a lot of children forced indoors, stuck at home due to stay-at-home orders and the number of deaths, unintentional deaths, due to children handling guns was on the rise. We needed to get a message out to these gun owners as quickly as possible to practice gun safety, a message that would be powerful yet wouldn't alienate them. [Break]

So welcome back, everyone. So in this final section of our presentation, I'm going to take you through how we make sure that our ESG strategy is successfully executed and the interest of our stakeholders are protected. I'm going to focus today on 4 key elements: first, our governance framework, and in particular, how this has been materially strengthened over the last 3 years; second, our approach to risk, not only how we are structured and resourced to manage risk, but also how we are driving a change in culture as a key line of defense; third, our specific approach to data, a key risk area; and fourth, how we have evolved remuneration structures to align more directly with our strategy, sustainability targets and shareholder interests. Turning then to our governance framework. As you can see up to 2018, the governance structure within WPP was pretty rudimentary. Board committees were in place, but there was little infrastructure on the executive side of the org chart. Today, we significantly strengthened the governance framework. Our audit and risk management, we've invested significant additional resource and made a very substantial step-up in the controls environment. The Audit Committee is now supported by the newly created WPP Risk Committee, which is oversight of all the operating network risk committees. We've also put in place 2 subcommittees with more specific remits at both WPP and at network level: the data privacy, security and ethics subcommittee and the risk and control subcommittee. In addition, we've put significant additional resource to support our efforts in this area. The internal audit function has been materially enhanced with the recruitment of a new head and an expansion of the team to 60 people. And we've put in place a new risk and controls group headed by a highly experienced lead, supported by 8 experts and a further 50-plus senior control executives at the agency level. On top of this, a technical accounting department is being established for the first time to assist with complex accounting matters. In other areas, we have formed an executive committee for the first time, our Global Inclusion Council that you've already heard from and our Sustainability Committee. And I'll go into some of these in more detail in the next couple of slides. Let's look at the changes at the Board level first. A balanced and challenging Board is critical for driving the business forward and delivering against our strategy. Today, we have an enhanced Board with experience across a diverse range of skills and geographies. At the end of 2020, over 50% of the non-exec directors have been on the Board less than 3 years with 3 new appointments during 2020: Sandrine Dufour, Angela Ahrendts and Tom Ilube. This year, we've also welcomed Dr. Ya-Qin Zhang to the Board, who will bring expertise in the Chinese consumer technology landscape. We've exceeded the Hampton-Alexander objective with female Board representation now at 43%, and we also meet the Parker Review objective on racial diversity. Now turning to the ExCo. It's crucial that we have engagement across the business to deliver against our overall strategy and to drive change in the organization to meet our sustainability targets. Mark set up the ExCo in 2019 to make combined collaborative decisions, bringing the agencies closer together with each other and with our central functions that support them. It's made up of 11 operating company CEOs and leaders of our enhanced corporate functions, including newly established roles, such as Chief Client Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing and Growth Officer. It's fair to say that the composition and cadence of meetings is pretty familiar for most big companies, but I can't stress enough what a cultural change this represents for WPP and what a difference it makes to decision-making and execution. At the end of 2019, we established the Sustainability Board Committee to review and monitor the group's industry-leading sustainability targets. It's chaired by Keith Weed, who many of you will know is a spearhead of Corporate Sustainability at Unilever for many years. I think WPP plays a really important role in using our scale to amplify our agency sustainability agendas, which can, in turn, give them a marketing boost and help them manage related risks. Our value-add is across 4 broad areas: bringing scale and weight to our combined efforts, providing expertise in tracking and responding to policy, managing systems and processes for data collection and reporting and being a network for best practice across the group. Importantly, the committee oversees reporting where we see ourselves as a leader and typically an early adopter, a stance that we intend to continue. Moving now to risk and the 3 lines of defense model that we have adopted. The first line happens at the agency level with company reviews. Operating companies implement their own controls and processes guided by WPP policies and training. Each network has a Global Risk Committee chaired by the CEO and with key senior managers participating to ensure that leadership has a full understanding of the risks across the business. The second line is at the executive management level through monthly reports, quarterly review meetings and the WPP Risk Committee. This is where the formation of the risk and controls group plays a very important role, and our business integrity function also sets the agenda of our Risk Committee. The third line is internal audit and oversight. We have an internal audit function of around 60 people, who with oversight from the Audit Committee provide an independent review of risk management. We also make use of external advisers as required. So with this newly applied framework, we can feel more confident in managing the risks inherent in our business. But structure and process is only one part of the story and not enough on its own. You need the right culture in place as well. The quality and competence of our people, their integrity, ethics and behavior and the culture embedded within our businesses are all vital to the maintenance of our system of internal control. We want to embed a culture of integrity and transparency where our people recognize that doing the right thing is good for business. As a result, we've invested significantly in our training platforms and now have mandatory annual completion in place. This covers our How We Behave program and our Belonging program, which is our global inclusion and diversity training. We've also doubled down on facilitating whistleblowing through our Right To Speak hotline, which is independently managed, confidential and anonymous. And in 2020, we received 480 Right To Speak reports, all of which were followed up and investigated by our legal and business integrity teams and reported to the Audit Committee. Turning to data and privacy. As you know, data plays an essential role in our work for clients, and we have a responsibility to handle this data in a privacy-first way. Our Risk Committee has oversight over how we manage risk when it comes to data. But most importantly, we look at this through a client lens. Through governance policies, training and awareness, we address the issues that clients are really focused on, such as what data we have and how we use it; is the use of that data ethical; what DE&I data can we track; our commercial response to broader industry changes, such as deprecation of third-party cookies and global ad tech regulation. And there are plenty of examples of our agencies working in party with our clients to create ethical frameworks for data usage. To name just 2, we ran a privacy summit with a major retail client, drawing in 90 attendees from across agencies and business teams. And we work with an FMCG client as part of industry consortium for measuring DEI in production. Choreograph is also a structural answer to these challenges with privacy, absolutely baked into the service offer. Its work is critical to navigating the privacy compliance landscape, giving clients control and ownership of their first-party data. This short film explains in a bit more detail how GroupM thinks about data ethics and works with client on the subject. [Presentation]

Finally, how do we pull this together through how people are incentivized? First, retaining key people and driving collaboration is pivotal to WPP's success. We do this through a very broad-based WPP share ownership or action plans, encompassing over 40% of the workforce. More recently, 8 executives now have an element of WPP performance in their targets to drive collaboration throughout the organization. Second, senior executives are being held to account on ESG metrics. DE&I goals have been included in incentive plans for senior executives for the first time in 2021. And carbon reduction and single-use plastic targets have been included in incentive plans for executive directors for the first time also in 2021. And third, in 2020, the Compensation Committee reviewed and updated the EPSP policy for executive directors. Performance metrics have been changed based on feedback from shareholders over the years to create a closer alignment of interest. In addition, maximum awards have been significantly reduced, but we still retain very high share ownership requirements. So that's a brief summary of how we have evolved our governance and risk management functions to deliver our strategy more effectively. Let me now hand back to Mark to summarize before our Q&A session.

Thank you, John. So to sum all of this up, as I think it's clear, ESG is a critical topic for all of our stakeholders, particularly our clients and our people and you, our shareholders. For our business, it's a clear opportunity of differentiation and for growth. Our clients are looking for our expertise, advice and insight across everything from internal communications to product innovation and design. And it's only going to grow in importance. Secondly, our ESG strategy is deeply integrated into our corporate and business strategy. It's overseen by a strong and comprehensive governance framework that's been significantly enhanced in the last 3 years. And finally, we'll continue to be rigorous and transparent in our measurement and reporting so that you can track our progress. So we're going to begin our live Q&A session with John, Lindsay, Jacqui, Hannah and me. I welcome anyone to submit questions today via the webcast platform. We have a couple of questions submitted in advance. We'll kick off with that. [Operator Instructions] And let's start with the pre-submitted questions.

So I'm going to chair this session. And the first question comes from Pauline Lecoursonnois from Federated Hermes. So her question is -- I'll read it all out. We welcome the addition of Planet to WPP's purpose, which is to use the power of creativity to build better futures for its people, planet, clients and communities. A better future for our planet means achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and reversing the loss of biodiversity. Do you have a strategy to ensure your advertising activity do not promote behaviors that are misaligned with these goals? And can you improve your disclosure to demonstrate how this strategy is implemented. So thank you, Pauline. So I think in answering that, I think the first point to make is that we're actually committed to ensuring net zero in our scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions we demonstrated, I think, throughout today's presentation. And the goal to do that is as much as possible by reducing emissions rather than offsetting the emissions that we do have. I think the second point to make is, yes, we do work with energy companies. And most, if not all of these, are proactively working on their own transition strategies, some have their own initiatives, some with prompting from shareholders and other stakeholders. And I do believe that these companies should be able to communicate the steps they're taking in this transition in a fair way to consumers so they get credit for that. So those companies that do the most get the most credit. Now then we need to look at the issue of greenwashing. And I think that's a difficult issue for companies, particularly in this age of social media, which calls out greenwashing very clearly. And there's absolutely something that we wouldn't do at all. So you can see, I think you saw in the presentation, the work we did with H&M on circular shopping. And if I turn to a specific example in energy with BP, we actually work very closely with their leadership team on their new policy, which stopped corp advertising and redirected their corp advertising dollars back into more sustainable -- or back into the transition. So I think we do want to work with those companies that share our values and work on this. And then to address directly the point about our activities, I'd say that we fully sign up to the principles of responsible marketing. So we have to market products and the use of these products in a responsible way, and we'd look for our clients to do the same thing. And I think those clients that don't share those values, ultimately, we would part ways from. On your second question around disclosure and transparency, the first point I'd make is that our work by definition is transparent because it reaches the public, so everyone can see the work that we do. So we do advise clients in private on the steps and actions that they could take. And I think it's important to be able to do that to speed for their transition. And we have signed up in an early stage to these disclosures, the TCFC (sic) [ TCFD ], the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure we signed up to. We're now looking at the TNFD, the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and seeing how we can start up to that. So I think we are working on the areas that we talked about. And the second question is from Lina Ghayor, Exane, around is there content or platforms that you don't want advert to be associated with, e.g., adverts for harmful products, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, junk food or channels with strong political views? And I'd just say that, that builds to some extent on the point that we just made, that we want to work with those clients that share the values that we have, that we want to communicate products and the use of those products in a responsible way. Issues like alcohol and junk food are products that are legally out to being sold, and I think many people do enjoy them responsibly. So our focus really is on promoting the responsible use of those products. Now when it turns to platforms, I think we are being pretty proactive there. Our partnership with TikTok was one around brand safety. If you look at the work that GroupM did that was mentioned around promoting supply diversity, particularly black meters in the U.S. They were doing a lot of work there to have platform diversity. Okay. So I promised I'm about to answer all the questions. So Lindsay, why don't we take the question from Matthew Walker. Are purpose campaigns expanding the client wallet or just sharing a reallocation from other ad spending?

Thank you for the question. I think it's a little bit of both. I think in pretty much every campaign brief we're getting now, we're being asked to consider elements of ESG, whether that's sustainability, climate change, DE&I in the work that we're doing. So there's always that lens being applied, in a sense check on what we're doing, whether that's creating content work, packaging, design or thinking about the media plans and the media that we activate. And GroupM, again, do some tremendous work actually led by mind-sharing work called change the brief where they offer clients an alternate solution to any brief that comes into them and thinking about a different environmental impact and an answer to that. I would say that's the first answer, that it's now a lens applied across almost everything we do. I think the second thing is actually there is an expansion because -- using disability as an example. That's a $3 trillion unmet market. Nobody is talking to people with disabilities in a way that is inclusive, in a way that is considering their needs and their experiences. And so we anticipate that, that is actually expanding the remit of what we can do. And there, as you saw with Christina, it was a brilliant example, we believe we are well placed to help clients in co-creating solutions for that.

And let's ask maybe Julien's question as a follow-on, Lindsay. So would you be ready to turn down lucrative clients if the product was wrong, with an advert that look like a nasty obesity-inducing burger or a gasoline SUV?

Well, John is sitting next to me. I joked. I mean, again, the work we've done -- and Mark, you've kind of answered it earlier. We work for many clients in many categories, and most clients are on a journey. Ford is on a journey to electrification, so is Volkswagen, so is Toyota, so is Mazda. So we turn our time and attention to thinking how we change consumer views and how we will drive consumer behavior so that we create the need and demand for products that are going to help the environment. And actually, that H&M example, that's about changing and elevating the demand for sustainable fashion. So our job is to help shape and change that. So that would be my tested answer. And there's nothing wrong with a burger. I have a burger once a week, and I might have a salad 3 days a week. So people have a choice and we provide them with those choices, and there's no such thing as black and white in the choices that people make. We help people make sensible choices every day.

Once -- I might eat with you about once a week, Lindsay. Now John, there's a question here. You've described a significant improvement in your controls environment, but you reported a number of material weaknesses at the year-end. How do you address that?

Well, thank you, Mark. It's important to remember that the material weaknesses that we identified actually stemmed back to policies that were adopted over 10 years ago in the business. And obviously, since finding these errors, we've done a really thorough review of all of our accounting policies across the board using both internal resource and also external expertise as well. We've also changed the structure of our group reporting team to bring it on a single leadership. We've created a technical accounting team to continue on an ongoing basis to review all of our applications of policy. And you heard me talk earlier on about the investments that we've made in internal audits and in our second line of defense, in particular, by bringing additional resources into the business. So you can never guarantee that you're going to identify every single issue within the organization, but I feel pretty confident with all the work that we've done over the last 12 months and the infrastructure that we've put in place, that we will certainly mitigate the risks of these errors happening again.

Very good. All right. So Hannah, there's a question here from Matthew Walker. How will you account for your -- I'll add some editorial to the end of the question -- how will you account for your heavily polluting clients in your metrics? I think maybe just sort of rephrase that, how we look at, let's say, energy companies, automotive companies, how do we address that through sort of scope 1, 2, 3 and other metrics as part of our climate strategy?

Thanks, Mark. I think the first thing to say is that we're going to start or continue to focus on the areas where we have the most influence. And that's, first and foremost, our scope 1 and 2 in addressing our direct impact as a business. And the big step change for us this year is extending that to really think about the impact and influence we can have on our scope 3 emissions. And that means thinking about how we can engage with our suppliers, with our media vendors to reduce emissions across our value chain. And we heard from Mark Patterson at GroupM about how we're going to be thinking about how we can shift the whole media sector. And we heard from Richard Glasson about some of the extraordinary innovation that's been inspired in part by some of the changes that were forced upon us through the pandemic, but also in thinking about how they could step up to the climate change challenge. And really, the greenhouse gas protocol at the moment doesn't really allow for us to incorporate client's emissions into the way that we account. But as Lindsay was saying, we're thinking about how we can help them on the journey and really thinking hard about the content as well as the mechanisms for how we bring those messages to consumers.

That's great. So Lindsay, I think we have one more question so far. So people have another question particularly around our people strategy or around our work for communities. Please do ask if you want to have the maximum discussion that we can, Lindsay. The last question we have, so what evidence is that, that WPP is differentiated in its purpose, advice and creative from other agencies?

I think a few things without overtalking, but I do think the inclusive design practice we have at Wunderman Thompson, and Christina does a fantastic job actually across all WPP clients in talking and driving that work, is truly differentiated. I think that what the GroupM do as we've talked about, the change the brief offer to our clients, the commitment to Black-owned media and also actually something that our Motion Content Group has done is also committing to black creators, producers and studios. So investing in a fund there to make sure that content gets in front of the audiences as well, particularly focused in the states. We were founders of -- I'm going to say very self-congratulations. So sorry, but it's such a long list, but GroupM, the founders of GARM, which is their Global Alliance for Responsible Media. So thinking about, to John's point, the data and ethics and being -- thinking about the responsibility we have for the platforms and the content that goes out into the world. And to that note, we have a fantastic partnership, and we have a great partnership team led by Sanja, Marcelo and Stephan Pretorius. We have a partnership with a company called Super Awesome, which specifically looks to help with child safety guidelines when accessing online content. So it's kind of front and center of everything we do. And whether that's through the lens of our media spend or through the partnerships that we have with people, Mark, or TikTok or people like SuperAwesome, the work that Jacqui -- that Judy spoke to earlier about Unite, I think, is our convening power. I mean WPP is the largest marketing services group in the world. We have 105,000 colleagues who are passionate about the work we do. We spend $60 billion in media. We have super deep partnerships. So we can use that convening power with the World Health Organization, with Unstereotype Alliance, with UN Women, with Google, with Facebook, with TikTok to really help try and drive through change. So we have a responsibility as an industry leader. So I think using scale wisely is a superpower for us.

Yes. Absolutely. And I think it comes a lot to sort of how we can build our reputation and how we can embed this in our reputation. This is just one step, and we're having many of these discussions with our clients and our marketing. So I think that's it formally for the questions. I'd like to thank all my colleagues, Jacqui and Judy in the U.S., John, Lindsay, Hannah, who are here with me in the studio is Sea Containers. Thank you all for joining us. We hope that this session provided you with a better understanding of our strategy and progress on environmental, societal and governance issues. The team and I are available after this, Peregrine, Caitlin, Fran to take any follow-up questions or you can address those. Thank you all for watching and enjoy the rest of the day.