SOFIAC is looking to reframe how Canadians see greenhouse-gas emissions, in a very literal sense, by showing just how far a city’s carbon footprint can extend.

The new campaign, a collaboration with LG2 called “The True Size of Cities,” recalculates the physical footprint of Toronto based on the emissions generated by its industrial and commercial buildings.

The result is a redrawn and expanded city boundary that uses signs reading “Welcome to the True Size of Toronto” along its perimeter to confront passersby with the scale of carbon emissions.

Florent Moignard, SOFIAC’s director of marketing and communications, tells strategy that the initiative aimed to give businesses leaders a tangible understanding of the toll their buildings can have on the environment.

SOFIAC, or the Société de financement et d’accompagnement en performance énergétique, is an investment platform that helps companies decarbonize by financing and managing large-scale energy-efficiency projects.

“GHG emissions are an invisible problem,” Moignard says. “Talking about figures and tons of CO2 would have brought us back into the scientific, ‘big brains’ world. It would have been too easy to ignore it.”

To illustrate the scale, the creative team compared Toronto’s land area (630 square kilometres) to that of Ontario (892,412 square kilometres), and cross-referenced it with publicly available provincial emissions data. According to LG2’s calculations, while Toronto’s commercial and industrial buildings occupy only 0.07% of the province’s land area, they account for roughly 14 megatonnes of CO2 emissions — close to 9% of Ontario’s total.

The calculation isn’t meant to be a precise scientific measure, according to LG2, but an accessible way to show how a relatively small footprint can carry a disproportionately large environmental impact.

The campaign is a launching pad for a new brand platform that aims to position SOFIAC as a partner that “pushes the boundaries” of corporate decarbonization, according to Moignard.

An accompanying video captures the installation of signs around Toronto and drives viewers to an interactive map, developed by LG2’s recently launched REF Digital agency, that displays the “true size” of five cities: Toronto, Montreal, Moncton, Vancouver and Paris.

According to Moignard, the campaign is performing well above expectations, particularly on LinkedIn, a key channel for reaching SOFIAC’s B2B audience.

“We don’t have the media budget for a large-scale campaign, so every asset and initiative needs to overperform,” Moignard says. “Studies show that awareness and familiarity are the key factors in being chosen in B2B, regardless of the industry …  In other words, we didn’t have the budget to be boring.”

LG2’s intent was to take a complex issue – the CO2 emitted by large buildings – and create a strong enough hook to start conversations. By reframing buildings not by their square footage but by their carbon output, the agency aimed to make emissions something people could both see and feel.

“Our challenge was to make CO2 emissions concrete and tangible,” Martin Charron, creative director at LG2 said in a news release. “By creating a territorial dissonance, we aimed to spark surprise, discussion and, ultimately, awareness.”

While “The True Size of Cities” campaign’s roots are in that call to awareness, it ultimately connects back to SOFIAC’s purpose to help businesses take measurable action. The company funds 100% of project costs to eliminate financial and technical barriers to energy transition through building retrofits.

SOFIAC was launched in January 2021 by energy transition and climate consulting service Econoler and labour-sponsored investment fund Fondaction. The project is supported by Quebec’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources Canada and investments from partners such as the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Fiera Private Debt.

The initiative is part of the Quebec government’s 2030 goal to enhance energy efficiency by 15% and reduce the amount of petroleum products consumed by 40%.

“When LG2 presented the ‘True Size of Cities’ concept, we immediately saw how clever it was … and how much potential it had to spark conversations,” Moignard says. “We believe in the power of creativity and in the ability of a creative approach to maximize marketing impact.”