Bicester business to receive King's Award for sustainability efforts
Webmart is one of three Oxfordshire companies being honoured
A Bicester-based marketing agency is being recognised with a King’s Award for Enterprise, one of the UK’s highest honours for business achievement.
Webmart is among three Oxfordshire recipients this year, joined by 3Keel Group in Hanborough and Airdri Limited in Eynsham.
There are a further 183 organisations nationally to receive the award, which marks the programme’s 60th anniversary and celebrates excellence across areas including sustainability, innovation and international trade.
Chief Client Officer Tom Maskill said the recognition follows recent milestones for the company after years of hard work.
“It’s been an ambition of ours for kind of four or five years," he said. "We've just launched our carbon calculation tools, we've reduced our emissions by about 72% and so we felt we had enough evidence to go for it."
“We see the King’s Award as the most prestigious awards you can get, so really, really proud of that.”
The agency, which works with around 170 clients, has evolved from its origins in print into a full-service marketing business spanning mail, data, creative and digital campaigns.
Tom said its founding principle was to show “there was a different and better way of doing business”.
“By including the environment and wider stakeholders and staff and suppliers and customers in your decision making, you can actually build a better, more resilient business that does well kind of commercially, but also has a bigger, broader benefits in society,” he said.
As part of that approach, the company distributes surplus profits among staff, has donated more than £1 million to charity and is rewilding 164 acres of land in Scotland.
It has also developed tools to measure and reduce the carbon impact of marketing campaigns, an area Tom said is often misunderstood.
“There’s a bit of a misconception that in order to be more sustainable, you have to spend loads more money and therefore be less profitable,” he said. “But when sustainability is done right, the opposite is true.”
He added that improving efficiency in campaigns can both cut emissions and boost performance, particularly in digital marketing.
“Digital marketing accounts for a greater carbon footprint globally than the aviation industry,” Tom said. “Very few people know that and even fewer people have the tools to be able to do anything about it.”
He said the company hopes the recognition will help influence the wider industry.
“The more people can see Webmart as a case study of a slightly different way of doing business, the more people will hopefully take elements of it and implement it within their own organisations,” he said.
The award will be presented locally by the Lord Lieutenant later this year.