2023 Winners of £2million Sky Zero Footprint Fund revealed

Thursday 17 August 2023

Five eco-friendly brands announced as winners of Sky’s 2023 £2 million sustainable advertising initiative.

This year, Grub Club, Milliways, Ocean Bottle, OceanSaver® and UpCircle have been selected by an esteemed judging panel to each win £250,000 in media value, helping to supercharge their sustainable brands.

The five brands will now move into ad production in advance of the final stage of judging in December, which will see the most compelling creative securing a total of £1 million in media value.

Established by Sky Media, the Sky Zero Footprint Fund, now in its third year, supports sustainable brands by helping to amplify their climate-positive campaigns using the power of TV and advertising

Sky announces Grub Club, Milliways, Ocean Bottle, OceanSaver® and UpCircle as the five winners of its award-winning Sky Zero Footprint Fund. Now in its third consecutive year, the £2 million advertising fund uses the power of TV advertising to tackle climate change by supporting campaigns that drive behaviour change for a more sustainable world.

The five winning brands were selected because of their pitch’s display to inspire change, with each one demonstrating sustainable values that align to Sky’s own. Sky Zero‘s pledge is to go net zero carbon by 2030 and inspire others to join the journey.

Last Thursday, 10th August, a panel of industry experts, with credentials in advertising, creativity and sustainability, met and assessed live pitches from the shortlisted brands at the Thinkbox HQ in Holborn. Each brand was judged on the merits of their creativity (ability to capture the attention of the nation); impact (the potential to drive real, tangible behavioural change); and sustainable credibility (their authentic commitment as a business to tackle climate change).

Each of the winning businesses has been awarded £250,000 in media value. They will now move into ad production, ahead of a final stage of judging in December, which will see the most compelling creative securing an additional £750,000 (totalling £1 million) in media value.

This year’s judging panel included a range of new additions with Chris Baker, Co-Founder of Serious Tissues who won the Grand Prix £1 million ad spend last year; Sky Sports News Presenter and Sustainability Lead, David Garrido; Pippa Glucklich, Chief Executive Office of Electric Glue; Marketing Consultant Michelle Carvil, author of Sustainable Marketing and Co-Founder of Can Marketing Save the Planet Podcast; Creative Consultant, Rosie Arnold; Richard Shotton, Behavioural Scientist and Author of The Illusion of Choice and The Choice Factory; and Dino Myers-Lamptey, founder of The Barber Shop & Co-Chair of The Conscious Advertising Network GSD Advisory Group.

The panel also saw the return of Stephen Woodford (Chair of the Advertising Association), Fiona Ball (Group Director of Bigger Picture at Sky), Sarah Jones (Director of Planning at Sky Media) Jo Fenn (Global Director of AdGreen) and Gideon Spanier (UK Editor in chief of Campaign).

All five winning ads will be produced using insights, tools and learnings from AdGreen. Part of the Advertising Association, AdGreen supports the ad industry shift towards net zero, eliminating the negative environmental impacts of production. Established by Sky Media, the Footprint Fund is part of the Sky Zero campaign to be net zero carbon by 2030.

The five winning businesses are (alphabetically):

Grub Club(Hypoallergenic insect-based dog food)
Milliways (Plastic free, plant powered and planet friendly gum)
Ocean Bottle (B Corp certified reusable bottles)
OceanSaver® (Ocean safe eco cleaning products)
UpCircle (Natural skincare with upcycled ingredients)

Sarah Jones, Director of Planning at Sky Media, said "It’s been an absolute honour to work on the Sky Zero Footprint Fund for the last two years and I’ve been so inspired by the brilliant range of applications this year too. The calibre of presentations we saw in the Footprint Fund Dragon’s Den was truly exceptional. Thanks to our fantastic judging panel who helped to select our winners - I can’t wait to see the ads from our final 5 in December and to see the impact they have when they launch their campaigns.”

Fiona Ball, Group Director of the Bigger Picture and Sustainability at Sky, said: “Sky uses its platforms to engage audiences on climate change and encourage steps to reduce carbon emissions. Over the last two years, the Sky Zero Footprint Fund has helped produce 10 exceptional adverts, propelling sustainable brands’ messages onto television to inspire wide, tangible behavioural change. Advertising can play a key role in raising awareness of climate issues and inspiring changes in daily habits, so we look forward to seeing the 2023 winners’ adverts on our TV channels.”

Alessandro Di Trapani, Cofounder & CEO, Grub Club, said, “We are absolutely buzzing to have made this year’s Final 5. The Sky Zero Footprint Fund gives us an incredible opportunity to tell the Grub Club story to millions of people across the UK, which will be a game-changer for us in educating pet parents about the sustainable alternatives that exist in pet food. Time to turn man’s best friend into Earth’s best friend.”

Tom Raviv, Founder and CEO, Milliways, said “We’re incredibly excited to be given this opportunity with Sky. We launched Milliways with the mission of taking the plastic and artificial ingredients out of conventional gum and replacing them with a plant-based and plastic-free alternatives. It’s important for us to inform the public that most gum brands are made from single-use plastics which pollute our planet and may harm our health. Working with the Sky Zero Footprint Fund aligns with our mission and gives us the perfect platform to share Milliways’ story and purpose with the world – taking us a step closer towards making Milliways accessible for everyone to enjoy.”

William Pearson, CEO of Ocean Bottle, said: “We are thrilled to have been selected as one of the winners of the Sky Zero Footprint Fund. With Sky's full support Ocean Bottle will be able to reach millions of people across the UK and fund the collection of over 100 million plastic bottles in weight and prevent them from entering the ocean in coastal communities around the world. We hope to help unbrainwash the nation from the single use habits we have all become so accustomed to, save our pockets and the environment and make some history in the process.”

Adam Joe Parker, Marketing Director, OceanSaver® said, “The OceanSaver team is absolutely cod-smacked and delighted to have been selected as a Sky Zero Footprint Fund winner. This is a real seal of approval that saving our Ocean is critical to helping us solve the climate challenge and our creative idea that “the Ocean will thank you” for the small changes you make. We know that most people want to be more eco-friendly and deeply care about our Ocean. That’s why we’re making it easy for anyone to become an OceanSaver. We’re excited to partner with Sky to involve even more people in our wave of change.”

Anna Brightman, Co-Founder, UpCircle, said, “We are ecstatic to have made it into the final five brands in the Sky Zero Footprint Fund. With our total commitment to the circular economy we’ve been pretty disruptive in the beauty industry since day one, setting a new standard. It’s an industry which sends 120 billion units of packaging to landfill per year, so a new standard is necessary! This opportunity could be pivotal for UpCircle, taking the next big step towards making a concept like ours more mainstream. It’s incredibly exciting to know that we now have the opportunity to show our innovative ingredient rescuing concept on national TV and we can’t wait to get started”.

Notes to editors

Qualifying conditions and offer prize confirmation can be found on the fund website. To get all further details on the Sky Zero Footprint Fund, visit www.skymedia.co.uk/skyzerofootprintfund/.

About the Sky Zero Footprint Fund

The Sky Zero Footprint Fund is a multi-award winning £2 million advertising fund designed to help brands accelerate and amplify initiatives that address climate change through more sustainable products and behaviours. . Sky believes it has a role to play in helping tackle the climate crisis and has established this initiative as part of its Sky Zero campaign to be net zero carbon by 2030.

Open to media agencies, creative agencies and brands in the UK and Ireland, the fund attracts a highly competitive pool of entries with many businesses creating game-changing products, services, and campaigns to drive more sustainable consumer choices.

So far, the fund has won British Media Award’s 2022 Best Sustainability Initiative, Ad Net Zero’s 2022 Media Award and the 2023 Media Leader Sustainability Excellence Award.

Sky Media is the advertising sales arm of Sky, helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to grow. Through world-class premium content & channels, combined with market-leading data-driven innovations like AdSmart, Sky Media gives brands access to audiences wherever they are, however they watch.

Reaching over 93% of the UK population, Sky Media represents over 130 channels including all of Sky’s quality channels and sites including Sky Sports, Sky News, Sky Max, Sky Showcase, Sky Cinema, Sky Arts, Sky Atlantic, Sky Crime, Sky Comedy, Sky Witness, Sky Nature, Sky Documentaries and Sky HISTORY. Sky Media also sells on behalf of a range of renowned broadcasters including Paramount (Channel 5, MTV, Comedy Central), Warner Bros. Discovery, GREAT!, A+E Networks, AMC Networks and BT Sport.

As Europe’s leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company and owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, Sky Media has a truly global footprint. So whether local, national or international, new to TV, a startup looking to scale quickly or an established brand; Sky Media’s award-winning solutions deliver for brands.

Website: www.SkyMedia.co.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sky-media-uk/

Website: www.Adsmartfromsky.co.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adsmart-from-sky/

Milliways is plastic-free, plant-based and planet-friendly chewing gum. The best-selling and award-winning range is fully biodegradable, aspartame-free, sugar-free, vegan and compostable. Most chewing gum brands are made from artificial additives and chewy plastic ingredients which may cause harm to our health and our environment. Milliways is on a mission to make its Super Natural Gum the norm for everyone, every day. Available in a variety of flavours including Peppermint, Mighty Mint, Bubble Mint and Watermelon, you can grab a pack of Milliways at any Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Pret A Manger, Costa, Whole Foods and WH Smith nationwide.

Ocean Bottle is a B Corp certified reusable bottle brand that enables individuals to turn the tide on plastic pollution. With the sale of each Ocean Bottle, 11.4kg of ocean-bound plastic (the equivalent of 1,000 plastic bottles) is collected globally, in coastal areas where plastic pollution is worst. This plastic collection is actualised in partnership with plastic collection organisations; Plastic Bank, Plastics for Change and Repurpose Global.

The award-winning bottles have been designed with K8 Design and are recyclable and part made from recycled ocean plastic. Features include a dual opening, hot and cold insulation, dishwasher proof and a handy carry loop. Each bottle is embedded with an NFC enabled smart-chip, which allows owners to register the bottle to the Ocean Bottle Mobile App to further fund the collection of ocean-bound plastic (for free) each time a refill is registered.

Since launching in 2019 the Ocean Bottle ecosystem has prevented over 9.1 MILLION kgs of ocean-bound plastic from reaching the ocean and Ocean Bottle aim to prevent 7 billion plastic bottles from entering the ocean by 2025.

OceanSaver® exists to save our Ocean from the plastic pollution caused by 28 billion single-use plastic cleaning products created every year. Our plastic-free, plant-based Laundry, Surface Cleaning, and Dishwashing products clean like the leading brands without harming Ocean life. They are easy to buy in Tesco, ASDA, Ocado, Amazon, and our website, and are priced so that you can save a few squid when you clean. Say “Pollocks to Plastic” and join over 61,000 OceanSavers today!

One third of all food in the UK is wasted, yet nearly one third of people have a skincare routine. That’s one huge opportunity to save the planet through skincare. At UpCircle, we make sustainable skincare products from ingredients that would otherwise be discarded. We’re stocked in household retailers like Space NK, Holland & Barrett, Ocado, Oliver Bonas, Oxfam, Sephora, Look Fantastic, Whole Foods, Superdrug and more. Our brand has seen staggering growth in the last seven years, selling hundreds of thousands of products per year, in over 45 different countries. In fact, an UpCircle best seller sells every 90 seconds. We have over 25,000 5* reviews and a cult following that we fondly call our “UpCirclers”. It all started when we discovered that more than 500,000 tonnes of coffee grounds that are consumed each year in the UK alone are sent to landfill (where they produce methane). On discovering this, my brother Will and I decided to start collecting coffee grounds from cafes across London and transforming them into skincare products.

But it's not just coffee! We've come a long way since then and now upcycle more than 25 by-product ingredients – upcycled oat husks, rose petals, hibiscus acids and orange peel wax are now all being rescued for our latest launches. We've also extended the circular approach that we take to our ingredients to packaging too, and have now refilled 45,000 pieces of packaging via our “Return, Refill, Reuse” scheme.

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