A New Way to Measure the Climate Impact of Ads

To truly address the climate crisis, carbon emissions reduction is required across all industries—including media buying. But to track progress and determine a baseline, the advertising industry needs a common language, agreed-upon measurement tools and a plan for what to tackle first, according to WPP-owned media agency GroupM. With that in mind, the firm released a new report today, Calculating a Cleaner Future Now: A Unified Methodology for Accelerated Media Decarbonization. The report includes a set of methodologies and processes for measuring and reducing the carbon impact of the media supply chain. If adopted industry-wide, it would allow advertisers to more easily and accurately measure the impact of their media campaigns. "The severity of the climate crisis requires the entire industry to prioritize media decarbonization and reducing the carbon output of advertising activities," Krystal Olivieri, global chief innovation officer at GroupM and Choreograph, said in a statement. "We implore the entire industry to align, improve and scale this methodology together to create a better future for media and the world we live in.” Still, activists argue that the announcement further exposes the hypocrisy of WPP on climate issues. CEO Mark Read has repeatedly defended the group's work with fossil fuel clients, which include Shell, BP and Chevron across its global network of agencies. Any increase in those companies' sales as a result of a WPP agency's work would quickly outweigh the impact of decarbonizing its media business, they note. A lifecycle assessment for ads Working with independent specialists in carbon measurement and incorporating input from clients, industry partners, third parties and experts across WPP, GroupM developed a lifecycle assessment for ads in alignment with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The framework measures carbon emissions across all formats, channels and markets of the media value chain, the agency said. Consistent measurement of the climate impact of different platforms and publishers could give advertisers and media planners a better idea of what they're investing in, in terms of climate impact. Ideally, that would then incentivize a stricter standard among those platforms and publishers, GroupM explained. To encourage industry-wide adoption, the agency is making the framework available to "industry bodies and organizations committed to decarbonizing the media supply chain," it said. The most important thing to happen in sustainable advertising The framework will allow the media and ad tech industries to "actually treat sustainability like something we can measure, we can manage and we can ideally decarbonize," Brian O'Kelley, co-founder and CEO of ad tech B Corp Scope3, explained to Adweek. "That's the most important thing that's going to happen in sustainable advertising this year—that is, if we could get broad industry buy-in," O'Kelley added. "The next step would be to have everybody start measuring." Cradle-to-gate To ensure consistency across the board, the methodology currently only measures the lifecycle of an ad campaign from "cradle-to-gate." That means that it excludes the carbon emissions created after the product leaves advertiser. For now, there's not enough data to measure the impact of consumer viewing and end-of-life, though GroupM aims to add that to the equation as it becomes more available. "Although we can currently capture incremental data of what consumers do with an ad after they engage with it on smart media like smart phones or OTT, there is currently no reliable data on how consumers dispose of a newspaper ad, for example,” Olivieri said. “Because we need to have a consistent measurement approach across all channels, we have decided to measure cradle-to-gate for now, but we will look to expand as rapidly as possible.” The framework's methodology currently measures emissions created between 'cradle' and 'gate.' One carbon calculator to rule them all GroupM's report highlighted many different industry measurement tools and carbon calculators that have been developed in recent years. More importantly, it also identified a series of problems with all of those metrics. For example, available tools use incomplete data, estimations and inconsistent parameters, or they fail to align with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and other relevant guidance. The new framework aims to solve those inconsistencies and issues, creating the foundation for a more robust carbon calculator that GroupM expects to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022. "What we are presenting here is not intended to be a competitor to any existing industry initiative,” Oliver Joyce, global chief transformation officer at GroupM agency Mindshare, said in the report. "These findings are our attempt to consolidate the industry around a unified vision of decarbonization, starting with defining consistent parameters around parts of the value chain, then agreeing what data is required and coming together on a calculation methodology," he added. "Ad Net Zero sets out a fantastic sustainable vision for the industry—and this provides a potential for how we deliver it." The report also laid out an immediate to-do list for media planners, including things like buying ads from high-quality publishers, cutting complexity out of the supply chain and reducing the size of creative assets. The report outlined a series of actions that media planners can take to cut carbon emissions immediately. The problem with 'net zero' The new framework comes a little over a year after WPP released its own climate goals. It claims those objectives are in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and verified by the Science-Based Targets Initiative. The holding company outlined its commitment to reaching net zero in its direct carbon emissions by 2025. Specifically, it's referring to discharges resulting from its vehicles or facilities. WPP also counts the energy it takes to heat, cool and run those facilities. Overall, WPP's path to reach net zero in indirect carbon emissions—everything that happens to its products after they leave the facility—is promised by 2030. Net zero means that the company expects that it won't be able to cut all carbon emissions from its operations. So it plans to purchase certified "offsets" that create a theoretically equivalent positive climate impact—to balance out the unavoidable damage. In addition to its net zero commitments, WPP is aiming to reduce absolute direct carbon emissions by 84% by 2025 and absolute indirect emissions by 50% by 2030. This marks an important step away from a reliance on offsets—the promise of which, some experts argue, is overblown. WPP's friends in fossil fuels It goes without saying that more and better measurement of carbon emissions is a helpful thing in the fight against climate change. Still, some activists and industry observers see the focus on digital advertising's carbon footprint—a relatively small impact in the face of major polluters like oil and gas or the extraction and destruction of large-scale agriculture—as a distraction from the most pressing issues. WPP continues to retain Shell, BP and Chevron as clients across its network of agencies. CEO Mark Read has repeatedly defended those relationships. His main argument is that the companies need advertising and PR support during their transition to cleaner energies. WPP CEO Mark Read Talks Energy Clients, the Metaverse and Coca-Cola How big is media's carbon footprint, anyway? In GroupM's report, the agency estimates that 55% of WPP's current carbon emissions come from the media that it buys on behalf of its clients. That's equivalent to 7.3 billion miles driven by a gas-powered vehicle, the report estimates. While that sounds significant, American drivers alone covered nearly 3.3 trillion miles in 2019, according to the Federal Highway Administration, or about 9 billion miles per day. Investigative work from journalists like Neela Banerjee and Amy Westervelt has it made clear: it was the advertising and PR industry that worked alongside oil and gas giants for decades to bury, discredit and question climate science—while embedding oil and gas consumption deep within American culture and the American identity. "Media buying is not the biggest part of the industry's footprint," Duncan Meisel, director of Clean Creatives, a campaign to urge advertising and PR agencies to drop fossil fuel clients, told Adweek. "We have really excellent metrics that have been developed to measure the carbon footprint of ideas and sales. That's what advertised emissions does." (Advertised Emissions is a metric that climate-focused advertising network Purpose Disruptors established to measure the greenhouse gas emissions created by the increase in sales, resulting from successful ads.) "An ad that uses zero fossil fuels to promote fossil fuels is still a net negative for the climate," Meisel said. Adweek Releases First Sustainability Special Report

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