In setting out to write this a few weeks ago, I was thinking about how important it was to square a response to the here and now with a responsibility for the long-term impact of our industry on people and the planet.

Then riots from far-right agitators here in the UK set fire to high streets and hotels, egged on by perhaps the world’s least responsible billionaire (it’s a crowded field) who in the same week essentially sued the non-profit Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) out of operation and threatened advertisers for daring to not spend money fuelling the fire.

With that malignant undertone to contend with, thoughts are otherwise turning towards the crucial Q4 sales period where brands look nervously at what the latest economic indicators and political climate mean for their growth forecasts. In this context, the concept of responsibility and sustainability can take something of a back seat to hitting targets and going again next year.

And that’s assuming it’s just as ‘simple’ as achieving that number, which in this fragmented, febrile age of exponential technological acceleration, it resolutely is not. New ways of doing the old thing abound, all dancing to the drumbeat of the supposed opportunities or perils of AI, depending on what level of optimism the industry is tuned to today.

It’s the ‘fifth on the to-do list’ problem. You know it’s important, but the urgency of the next campaign seconds after wrapping up the last one, or getting to grips with a new streaming service, or the will-they-won’t-they of cookie deprecation, or whatever generative AI the platforms have built in that’s somehow overlaid a tropical house version of Beethoven’s Ninth onto your BAU ads starts to take priority. And that’s alongside the minutiae of keeping customers and stakeholders happy.

So if you’re an advertiser, particularly in the start-up or scale-up world where you’re already reusing and recycling your talents doing the job of four, and someone comes to you telling you that you need more metrics, it’s probably going to cost you more upfront while you’re at it and if you make a mess of it you’re on the hook for fines that make GDPR look like small potatoes, you’re probably going to politely tell them where to go.

It’d be lovely if someone came along to say that it’s simple, and here are three easy steps. But that’s for the monorail salesman.

By now the prescription should be familiar. Advertising, done well, drives growth and consumption. In the pursuit of that growth the instinct is to go for more. More impacts. More ad units. More channels and platforms to run them out on to the point of saturation.

But so often all that ‘more’ does is increase the emissions of a data centre owned by Google or Amazon, thrumming with energy that has to get paid for somehow.

Or it’s selling more stuff that immediately gets sent back to the warehouse on its way to fouling up the Atacama Desert.

Or it’s running up more juicy margins for Made for Arbitrage sites running misinformation rackets while yours get stripped so thin on the race to the bottom that your business model becomes one of unplanned obsolescence.

You’re responsible for the sustainability of your business, and with that comes stewardship of resources, both yours and those of the planet. Put another way, you’re responsible for not wasting resources, and there’s a hell of a lot of waste and not quite as many resources as there once was. Doing less with more has never been a worse approach.

However, for every encouraging case study from the likes of Sanofi, who are able to reduce waste with no detriment to performance, there are thousands of advertisers who cannot run the risk of pulling back lest the competition occupy (or the bigger beasts swallow up) the space they fear they might leave. And very few agencies are going to tell their clients to expose themselves to that kind of risk.

So how to square this need to drive growth while acting responsibly, and juggling everything under the sun while doing it? Thankfully (and an open goal for those who might accuse this environmentalism of being student politics) it comes back to that old university chestnut of reframing the question.

Try: “What is it you mean by growth, and what are you making yourself and your business responsible for? Do you want to be proud of what you’ve built as well as of how you’ve built it?”

We ask (a variant of) this question to businesses going through critical periods of change several times a week. If you are constantly orienting solely towards that sales target; the Series A; the quarterly report then of course your vision will be laser focused on that.

We recognise that. It’s our job as your partner to be the peripheral and the long-term vision to see around and past that. Brands need partners who can define the ‘what’ when it comes to what growth looks like, and find the right ‘how’ - whether that’s a methodology, technology, partners or activations - to help you get there sustainably without falling into the ‘more’ trap.

In the world of sustainability, prioritising collaboration over competition is a superpower. There are great standards and initiatives being developed, and the right team, partners and - shock - rivals can help you make sense of them, making your workload more sustainable alongside your business, doing better by yourself and the world at large.

Look back at what’s in fifth place on that to-do list. What incentives and goals can you set yourself and your brand that prioritise long-term wellbeing of people and planet alongside doing your job at an outstanding level, so that the shiny and the new is the thing that gets bumped down the list?

You can content yourself, after all, with knowing that the Emperor’s New Clothes aren’t going to end up in landfill.