There is a particular kind of executive who talks about sustainability in the language of targets and reporting cycles, and there is a different kind who talks about it in the language of Tuesday afternoons. Guy Cawood, Global Chief Sustainability Officer at adm Indicia, belongs firmly to the second category. Ask him what a sustainable brand looks like, and he will not reach for a mission statement. He will describe a buyer, sitting at a desk, choosing between two suppliers for a display unit, with a deadline pressing and a cheaper option sitting right there. That moment, he argues, is the entire story. Everything else is commentary.
It is a strikingly unglamorous way to talk about one of the most fashionable subjects in global business, and that is precisely the point. Cawood has spent his career inside the machinery of decision making, in procurement, retail marketing, technology, global operations and business transformation, long before sustainability carried the weight it does today. That path has left him with little patience for grand pronouncements and a deep interest in something far less visible: the thousands of ordinary choices that quietly determine whether a company’s environmental promises are real or merely printed.
At adm Indicia, a global brand activation agency operating in more than one hundred markets, Cawood has set himself an unusual goal. He wants sustainability to disappear, not as a priority, but as a separate conversation. In its place, he wants better decisions, made earlier, by people who never needed to be told to make them.
A Career Built on Systems, Not Slogans
Cawood’s route into sustainability leadership was never a straight line, and he is candid about that. His background sits across procurement, retail marketing, technology and business transformation, a mix that might look scattered on paper but reads, in conversation, as entirely deliberate. Each stop taught him something that would later define how he leads.
“Organisations rarely succeed because they have the best strategy. They succeed because they consistently make better decisions.”
That distinction sits at the heart of everything he does. Strategy documents are easy to write and easy to admire. What is difficult, and what actually determines outcomes, is the accumulation of smaller choices made by people who never see themselves as strategists at all. A designer selecting a material. A buyer confirming a supplier. A logistics manager choosing a freight route. None of these people think of themselves as shaping a company’s environmental footprint, yet collectively, that is exactly what they do.
Cawood traces part of this thinking back to his upbringing in South Africa, which he credits with giving him an early and lasting appreciation for the natural world. But it was his professional life, not his childhood, that turned that appreciation into a discipline. Working across marketing campaigns, he became fascinated by how much complexity sits behind something as seemingly simple as a retail promotion, noting that every campaign involves thousands of decisions across design, sourcing, production, logistics and supplier management, and that small decisions, repeated consistently, shape both commercial and environmental outcomes.
That observation now functions as something close to a personal doctrine. Cawood does not see sustainability as a department bolted onto the side of a business, measuring what has already happened. He sees it as a natural consequence of good leadership and intelligent procurement, present in the room before a decision is made rather than arriving afterward with a scorecard. His role, as he describes it, is to connect people, technology and data so sustainability becomes embedded in everyday decisions rather than something measured only once those decisions have already been made.
It is a subtle shift in emphasis, but it changes almost everything about how the role is practised. A sustainability function built around measurement waits. A sustainability function built around decisions intervenes. This philosophy also explains why Cawood speaks so often about curiosity rather than expertise. Expertise, in his framing, tells you how something currently works. Curiosity asks whether it still should.
Marketing as the New Decision Engine
If there is one idea Cawood returns to more than any other, it is that marketing has quietly become something much larger than communication.
“Marketing is becoming far more than communication. It is becoming one of the largest decision engines within an organisation.”
Every campaign, in his description, sends ripples through procurement, supplier selection, manufacturing and logistics long before a consumer ever sees the finished result. The creative brief and the environmental footprint are not separate documents. They are the same decision, viewed from two angles.
That reframing carries real consequences for how Cawood believes the next decade will unfold. Creativity, procurement and sustainability may sit in different functions, but the outcomes they create are interconnected. A specification affects cost. Supplier capability influences quality and delivery. Material choice affects compliance, waste and environmental performance. The real insight comes from understanding the relationships between these measures rather than viewing each in isolation.
Technology enters Cawood’s thinking here, and he is careful to describe its role with precision rather than hype. For most of its history, business has assessed cost, quality, delivery and compliance as separate, largely unconnected metrics. The real insight lies in the relationships between them, relationships that are often invisible until data makes them legible. Artificial intelligence, in his account, is what finally allows an organisation to see those connections at scale, revealing where improving a supplier’s performance also reduces waste, or where a sourcing change can improve resilience while cutting environmental impact.
Yet Cawood resists letting technology take credit for judgement it cannot exercise.
“Data explains what happened. Insight explains why. Artificial intelligence helps predict what could happen. People still decide what should happen.”
That combination of data and human judgement underpins much of what adm Indicia offers its clients. The agency’s core solutions span activation planning, customer engagement through CRM and digital channels, creative and content production, procurement and logistics, media activation, point-of-sale and premiums, technology, and sustainability itself. By integrating data, technology and global procurement expertise across those disciplines, the company positions itself to simplify marketing execution for brands, strengthen their supply chains and deliver campaigns that perform commercially while standing up to environmental scrutiny.
What distinguishes adm Indicia from competitors, Cawood suggests, is not any single capability but the fact that strategy, execution and activation sit inside one integrated agency rather than being scattered across specialists who rarely speak to each other, allowing the company to plan, build and execute a brand’s campaign end to end, connecting digital and physical experiences under a single roof.
The Weight of What We Make
For an industry built on messaging, Cawood believes marketing has spent remarkably little time examining what it physically produces.
“Marketing measures itself carefully. Reach, impressions, conversion, share. What it rarely measures is tonnage.”
It is a deliberately jarring observation, and it points to a part of the industry that rarely makes it into strategy decks: the sheer volume of physical material that campaigns generate. Displays, point-of-sale units, packaging, samples, print and giveaways are produced at extraordinary scale, often for a promotional window measured in weeks, built from materials engineered to outlast that window by decades, and ultimately disposed of by a retailer with no stake in what happens next.
Cawood is quick to clarify this is not an argument against physical marketing itself. Physical activations work precisely because they are tangible, which is why the industry keeps producing them. His argument is about intention. Most of that material was specified without anyone asking basic questions: how long does it need to last, could it be reused across markets, could it be disassembled at the end of its life. Those questions cost nothing to ask at the design stage, and become nearly impossible to answer once the tooling has already been made.
He frames the opportunity in concrete terms. A display unit at the end of a campaign is not waste. It is board, metal and components that could re-enter the supply chain if someone had designed for that outcome from the outset. That logic extends beyond the industry’s own offcuts, into recovered ocean and river plastic, agricultural residues, textile scraps and industrial by-products, all increasingly being converted into viable substrates and components. For an industry that produces so much short-life material, Cawood sees an unusually good fit. Creating consistent demand for recovered material at scale is exactly what struggling recovery systems need to become economically self-sustaining, and turning a disposal cost into a usable input tends to be what makes environmental change durable rather than symbolic.
He is equally direct about how brands earn or lose consumer trust in this environment.
“A sustainable brand isn’t defined by what it publishes. It’s defined by what it decides when the deadline is tight and the cheaper option is available.”
Every brand, in his view, now has a stated position on sustainability. Far fewer have actually changed how they buy, and consumers have become skilled at noticing the gap. Trust does not erode when a company admits it has not finished the work. It erodes when a public claim outpaces the evidence behind it. The brands earning lasting trust, according to Cawood, are precise rather than aspirational in their language, honest about what they cannot yet measure, and consistent over years rather than reliant on periodic announcements, offering evidence at the point of decision rather than the point of reporting.
Looking further ahead, Cawood identifies three shifts he considers already visible.
The first is a move from reporting to proof, as regulation and consumer expectation converge on a single demand: show me. That pressure pushes data further upstream into design and specification, where it is harder to gather but far more useful once captured.
The second is the erosion of the historical wall between procurement and creative teams, since the choices that determine a campaign’s footprint, material, format, quantity, supplier and freight, are typically made weeks before anyone sees the finished creative work. Organisations that keep those functions in separate rooms, he warns, will keep discovering problems too late to fix them.
The third concerns the supply chain itself, which Cawood describes as the place where most environmental impact actually lives and where the available information is worst, a relationship problem rather than a technology problem, given the thousands of small suppliers now being asked for data they have never been asked to provide before.
From Compliance to Capability
Much of the language around corporate sustainability still treats it as a box to be checked before returning to business as usual. Cawood rejects that framing outright.
“Compliance should be the starting point, not the ambition.”
In his view, the organisations creating genuine value are embedding sustainability earlier in the decision-making process. Every design choice, specification, supplier appointment and procurement decision influences cost, quality, delivery, compliance and environmental performance. The opportunity is not simply to measure these independently, but to understand how they influence one another and use that insight to make better decisions.
Historically, these measures have often been viewed independently. adm Indicia’s ambition is to connect them through capabilities such as Impact Grade and the ongoing development of its Assure+ supplier partnership programme, creating greater visibility across products, suppliers and procurement decisions. The objective is to understand the relationships and trade-offs between commercial performance, supplier performance and sustainability before decisions are made.
For Cawood, the real opportunity sits in the relationship between the measures. A lower-cost supplier may create more quality failures or delivery risk, while a slightly higher-cost supplier may reduce waste, improve reliability and lower overall risk. Connecting these data points changes the procurement conversation from lowest price to best overall outcome, creating better commercial, operational and sustainability behaviours.
Cawood does not believe sustainability and commercial performance are in competition, and argues the opposite is usually true. When organisations improve supplier capability, reduce waste, simplify specifications and improve product design, they typically see gains in quality, resilience and efficiency alongside their environmental improvements. Applying a sustainability lens to a category, he notes, often surfaces specifications carried forward out of habit, formats designed for a retail environment that has since changed, and processes that once made sense and have quietly become redundant. Much of what surfaces is not really a sustainability problem at all. It is simply work that needs refreshing, brought to light by a discipline built to look for it.
The practical implication is a shift in where sustainability sits within the workflow. Rather than reviewing a finished campaign after the fact, Cawood’s team works to embed sustainability into briefing, design, procurement and supplier engagement from the start, giving teams the chance to optimise decisions before costs are locked in. When sustainability becomes part of everyday decision making rather than a compliance checkpoint, innovation tends to follow naturally, because people begin solving problems differently instead of simply satisfying a requirement.
Purpose Into Impact
Cawood’s leadership style is, by his own description, built around creating better decision makers rather than making every decision himself. Curiosity sits at the centre of that philosophy. The more an organisation understands the relationships between its people, its systems and its data, he believes, the better its decisions become. Humility follows close behind, since the best ideas rarely belong to a single person or a single function, and his job is to connect expertise, encourage challenge and build an environment where people feel confident acting on what they know. Above all, he tries to remain authentic, on the conviction that trust is built over time through consistency, transparency and simply doing what one has said one would do.
Asked about the legacy he hopes to leave, Cawood again avoids anything resembling a scoreboard.
“I’d like sustainability to stop being a conversation that happens after the decision has been made. The real test is whether a buyer specifying a display unit on an ordinary Tuesday makes a better call because sustainability is already embedded in the decision. Not a moment of transformation, but ten thousand small decisions going slightly differently.”
Within adm Indicia, Cawood says he wants to leave behind better decision makers rather than better decisions, capability that outlasts any one individual, himself included. More broadly, he hopes the wider marketing industry becomes honest about where its impact truly sits, arguing that the sector has spent decades scrutinising its messaging and comparatively little time examining what it physically produces and where that material ultimately ends up. That gap, he believes, is the opportunity.
Reducing environmental and social impact remains fundamental, but Cawood sees the bigger opportunity in improving the system itself. Better design, smarter sourcing and stronger supplier partnerships can reduce waste, improve resilience and create better commercial and environmental outcomes at the same time. The more ambitious question is whether the way brands design, source and produce can leave supply chains stronger than they found them: materials that return to use rather than to landfill, suppliers who become more capable, better paid and more resilient because of the work placed with them, communities and landscapes measurably better off because of a brand’s presence in them. He is candid that this regenerative model sits a long way from where the industry currently operates, but believes it begins with the same discipline that underpins everything else he has described: better decisions, made earlier, by people who understand what those decisions actually set in motion.
That discipline, Cawood suggests, ultimately comes down to a single idea: moving from purpose to impact. Most organisations already have purpose. Commitments have been made, targets published, ambitions set. What separates the organisations creating real change is whether any of that reaches the decisions that determine outcomes, what gets specified, who supplies it, how much gets made. His own career, he reflects, has taught him that nothing about this is fixed. Every specification, process and system was designed by someone, at a particular moment, for conditions that have since changed, and the only real obstacle is the assumption that something must remain as it is simply because that is how it has always been done.
Technology and data, in his account, make that questioning far more productive than it once was, allowing teams to understand a product’s footprint before it is produced and see patterns across thousands of suppliers that no individual could hold in their head. But technology only creates the opportunity. People are the ones who convert it into impact, and every meaningful decision involves a genuine tension, cost against durability, local sourcing against freight, what is measurable against what actually matters, that takes experience rather than computing power to resolve.
For readers meeting adm Indicia for the first time through Cawood’s story, the company he describes is a global brand activation agency built to help brands turn insight into action across retail, shopper and digital environments. Operating in, more than one hundred markets adm Indicia combines strategy, creativity, technology and marketing execution to deliver brand experiences with measurable business outcomes. Its stated purpose, simplifying marketing execution so clients can improve efficiency, maximise return on investment and build meaningful, sustainable engagement with their audiences, runs directly through everything Cawood describes about his own role within it.
It is, in the end, a strikingly patient philosophy for an industry known for speed and spectacle. Cawood is not promising a single breakthrough or a dramatic reinvention of how brands operate. He is describing something slower and, in his telling, considerably more durable: curiosity about what could be better, data to show where, and people with the judgement to act at the moment a decision is actually made. If it works the way he intends, nobody outside the room will ever notice it happening. They will simply notice, years from now, that the industry looks different than it used to.
