It’s hard to manage what you can’t measure.
Which is why the WFA’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and trade organization Ad Net Zero have spent the past year developing a framework for tracking emissions.
The Global Media Sustainability Framework, which was announced Monday during a panel at Cannes, is the first iteration of an effort that saw collaboration across all parts of the industry, including brands, agencies, publishers and vendors.
Supporters include the 4As, IAB, Dentsu, Google, GroupM, L’Oréal, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Mastercard, Meta and Unilever.
“What we were trying to achieve is to make reliable, consistent measurement of emissions through a series of voluntary industry standards and formulas,” said Anthony Falco, global director at Ad Net Zero.
Collaboration is key
It began a year ago – also at Cannes – when a group of early enthusiasts for finding more sustainable media were discussing what was and wasn’t working, according to Amy Williams, founder and CEO of Good-Loop, a sustainable ad tech startup.
The advertising industry has long lamented a lack of standards or guidance on how to track and reduce carbon emissions. Unless there’s agreement about the scope of what to measure and which media types and practices cause emissions, Williams said, “you’re going to get a different number with every vendor you work with.”
And getting different numbers “is really dangerous for this movement,” she said, because companies need consistent measurement to support more sustainable choices.
GARM’s 12-month effort involved collaboration among stakeholders from across the media supply chain. “These are peers and competitors working together to solve a common problem for the industry,” Falco said.
Although the outputs will likely be different vendor by vendor, said Good-Loop CTO Will Luttrell, the new framework assures advertisers they’re looking at data that’s been analyzed using consistent methods.
Advertisers have the prerogative to require their partners use the new framework, and GARM can improve upon it as more parties use it over time.
How does it work?
The framework is focusing on measurement across TV, digital and out of home, with additional formulas for print, radio and film to come soon.
Advertisers will be able to request data from media sellers using a common form, which should make data collection more efficient.
Sellers that use the framework will voluntarily share information about the provenance of data, how the data came about and the scope of the data, so it’s clear how measurements are being calculated, Falco said.
For example, GARM might call for the emissions of a device to be multiplied by the greenhouse gas mix of a power grid in a particular location.
A vendor like Good-Loop can now source that information to fill in the blanks in their own measurement processes, and brands can know the data is consistent.
Separating publishers from brands
Good-Loop has already implemented the framework and on Monday announced a new iteration of its carbon measurement and reduction product, which will be available to publishers for free.
Initially, the company was mostly focused on electricity use, but GARM emphasized the importance of “embodied emissions,” Williams said, which are all the emissions released during a product’s lifecycle.
Embodied emissions are five times higher than electricity emissions, she added.
The framework also establishes that a brand is no longer responsible for a publisher’s carbon footprint, which is different from Good-Loop’s previous approach of looking at a publisher’s emissions first and then calculating backward.
For example, in the past, if a brand ran a spot during the Super Bowl, it also got dinged for the network’s carbon emissions. Going forward, under the new framework, brands will only be responsible for the ad itself, including production, while the network that airs the Super Bowl will be responsible for other event-related emissions, said Luttrell.
As with most standardization efforts, this is about creating a foundation to build upon, Williams said.
The GARM framework makes baseline assumptions, such as that 50% of web traffic is mobile web and 50% is in app. But once an advertiser provides more data, like their own log-level information, they’ll be able to get more specific about the breakdown of their campaigns.
Eventually, Williams said, advertisers will see sustainability as the new requisite “hygiene factor” they won’t run a campaign without, like brand safety has become.
“My ambition is that this helps trigger a move to brand responsibility,” she said, “which is, rather than just block bad stuff, how do we invest media in a way that is [aligned with] values?”
