Aura Group is not a single agency. It is seven agencies with around 500 consultants across the group. That structure is a strength commercially and a complication when the question turns to carbon.
The pressure did not start inside Aura. It started with Aura's clients. Helene told us that their larger clients, and industrial clients especially, has to report their own figures. To do that, they need the numbers from their suppliers, and Aura is one of those suppliers. A communications group does not get to treat carbon as a side project when the deal itself depends on producing a credible figure upstream.
That is the tension Helene names directly: the carbon footprint is not a corporate virtue exercise. It is what Aura needs to compete for large clients in the first place. With a system to produce that figure credibly and at the required depth, the group is not just ahead in reporting. They have a commercial advantage in every pitch where a client asks the supplier-emissions question.
Plenty of tools promise a carbon number. Fewer produce one a client under their own reporting pressure will accept. The thing that made Aura choose Bardo was not a polished pitch. It was that Bardo could actually support them with what they needed: the ability to see the real footprint of purchases and individual invoices, not an aggregated estimate averaged across a category.
For a business that has to pass credible figures upstream to demanding industrial clients, that invoice-level visibility is the whole point. It is the difference between a number Aura can stand behind and one it has to caveat.
What made Bardo fit was granularity. Aura could see the actual footprint of each invoice, traceable to the line underneath it. That is the mechanism the entire commercial case rests on. When a number is traceable to a specific invoice, it is a number Aura can provide to a client who is themselves under reporting pressure, rather than a category average that collapses the moment someone asks where it came from.
The experience matched the need. Helene found the process reliable and the team easy to work with. For a group of seven agencies and hundreds of consultants, "easy to work with" is not a soft compliment. It is what keeps a new process from becoming another permanent drain on time.
Bardo Studio. Every supplier plotted by spend and emission intensity, every number traceable to an invoice.
The clearest before-and-after is where attention goes. With invoice-level data, Aura can focus on the things that have the most impact, and in a way that's easier to track. Instead of a flat estimate that treats every krona the same, the team can see which activities and suppliers actually drive the footprint, and put effort there.
That is the shift from reporting for its own sake to reporting that steers decisions. Less time proving a number is roughly right, more time acting on the parts that matter, and a figure that holds up when a client, or their auditor, follows it down to the invoice.
For Aura, the lesson generalizes cleanly. In markets where your clients carry their own Scope 3 obligations, your ability to produce a credible, traceable carbon figure is part of what makes you competitive. It is not a compliance afterthought bolted on at year end. It is table stakes for the deal.
Aura made that shift early. From a footprint they could not produce at the required depth, to invoice-level data they can hand upstream with confidence and use internally to focus on what actually moves the number. When the supplier question comes up in the next pitch, the answer is already sound data, not a promise to get back to them.