Advertisers hold the keys to reviving UN sustainability goals

Recently, The Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2025 from the United Nations was released and the results were bleak. Maybe we should not be surprised at the lack of progress on sustainability goals. As of late, sustainability has taken a back seat to other issues. Of the 167 sub-targets, only 25 are either on track or have already met their sustainability goals for 2030. That's an abysmal 15%. Key target areas such as no poverty, clean water and sanitation, peace, justice and strong institutions have no sub-targets on track.

Sustainability must be treated as a core business tenet. It shouldn't be a topic that can be seen as the flavour of the quarter and forgotten about the next. Business leaders need to pick up the reins on this issue. Advertisers in particular are poised to turn things around, even with a grim landscape.

Advertising has historically been one of the most influential media shaping values, desires and social norms. Beyond selling products, impactful campaigns can create shared cultural references and can have a profound impact on how societies define progress, success, beauty and responsibility.

One of the best examples is the push from anti-smoking campaigns. Despite the science behind smoking pointing out health issues associated with the habit, it was still seen as desirable by many. The desirability of tobacco products is actually an understatement, as smoking was embedded in culture.

Anti-smoking campaigns started to appear in the late 20th century, and at the start, they were able to help curb cigarette usage among adults. Once the campaigns had enough time to reach its target audience and have its message resonate, smoking rates went from 42% in 1964 to 18% in 2012.

Proof of the power of advertising that has a strong message and reaches the right audiences.

While public institutions should play a critical role, that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for brands to play too. Public campaigns can oftentimes lack what truly engages audiences. Where those campaigns may often feel institutional, brands can leverage aspirational storytelling that can cut across demographics and geographies. With larger media budgets and better creative storytelling resources, brands possess the ability to subtly educate while simultaneously normalising sustainable behaviours, making them aspirational rather than sacrificial.

The reality is that facts and rational arguments alone rarely shift behaviour at scale. What advertising does best is infuse emotion into information. Emotion creates empathy, and empathy creates responsibility.

Creativity is the catalyst here. Most people are not reading through 50-page sustainability reports. Through creativity, advertisers have the opportunity to produce campaigns that resonate with viewers.

We all know the This is Your Brain on Drugs commercial. Over 40 years later, it is still part of the cultural zeitgeist. Through provocation, storytelling and imagery, ads have the power to break through to the average consumer.

The harsh reality is that sustainable messaging has historically lived in the echo chamber of those who already believe in it. This is part of why we are seeing it decrease as a priority in 2025. But with the right methods, sustainability can break through to all demographics and once again be valued by the mainstream.

Sustainability isn’t just an issue for a few people; it is everyone’s problem to solve and should be treated that way. The more people, brands and public institutions that get involved, the better chance that it works back into the mainstream.

Truly impactful campaigns are able to break through these echo chambers and reach much larger groups. If there were a plethora of different groups and brands, all trying to create a breakthrough campaign, only the truly engaging ones would create noise. The creativity needed to reach audiences would lead to exciting, fresh, engaging campaigns that we haven’t seen in the sustainability world for some time.

One of the best examples of this is the shift we have seen around electric vehicles. Mainstream brands adopting sustainability messaging normalise certain behaviours at scale. Think of how electric vehicles used to be targeted to the green-thumb demographic are now marketed for the modern, tech-savvy, status-conscious consumer. It is almost a full 180 from what we used to see.

While advertising clearly holds immense power to influence consumer behaviour toward sustainability, the media industry itself must also confront its own environmental footprint. As one would expect, this shift won’t come without challenges.

The ANA Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark report found that digital waste has increased 34% in just two years. The digital advertising industry is grappling with a highly fragmented market, which makes supply path optimisation difficult and creates a lack of transparency for advertisers. The industry first needs to fix its sustainability problems before trying to address global sustainability issues. But looking forward, AI is set to be a transformative force, capable of streamlining the ad supply chain, enhancing targeting accuracy and improving cost efficiency by finding the most direct and effective path from advertisers to their desired audiences.

If the advertising industry commits to solving its own sustainability shortcomings and leans on the power it holds to address larger societal issues, there is no reason progress cannot be made.

The UN’s latest report should be a wake-up call for everyone. We’ve seen in the past the power advertising can have with key societal issues. If advertisers embrace sustainability the same way they have tackled other problems in the past, there is no reason that these goals cannot get back on track.

It isn’t just a chance to meet these goals; it’s an opportunity to redefine progress for the next generations.

Frank Maguire is the SVP of product marketing and sustainability at Equativ.

Source: Campaign India