Ad Net Zero: Are we nearly there?
5.12.24
YOU CAN ALSO CHECK
10.10.24
22.11.24
Share
The IAB’s Last Thursday Club is a members-only community that comes together monthly to discuss a topic of critical importance to the advertising industry. In November, our Product Marketing Director, Bernie Sham, joined Sue Phillips from Ipsos and Tim Pritchard from MG OMD to discuss Ad Net Zero – and to ask if our industry is close to achieving it. The discussion was recorded as a podcast, which can be found here.
It is a fascinating, wide-ranging chat that addresses many of the obstacles between the industry and true Net Zero. Despite the availability of initiatives like the Global Media Sustainability Framework, our industry has lagged behind others in adopting sustainability measures: the guests on the podcast discuss how best we can overcome some of the reticence and obstacles that are preventing change.
We have pulled out a few of the key insights from the podcast for you. We hope you find it as inspiring as we did.
Where does the buck stop?
The panel acknowledged the role of companies and governments when it comes to creating change.
Sue Phillips from Ipsos pointed out that while consumers are concerned about climate change, they feel the responsibility to affect change should not fall to them. She explained that, according to Ipsos’ study ‘What Worries The World’, issue slike inflation and inequality are cited as bigger problems. Climate change, by contrast, ranks at number eight on the global ranking of consumer concerns:
“So they cognitively acknowledge a problem. They are doing all they can, but they've basically got other more pressing concerns on their day to day world. So it's really up to companies and governments to push us in the direction that we need to go.”
Tim Pritchard pointed out that it is also on agencies and media buyers to push brands to take steps towards sustainability in advertising. He said that over the course of the past year OMD has urged its clients to avoid the “long tail of low-impact inventory, and responsible reach”. In doing so the team at OMD interrogated suppliers as to their own sustainability credentials, ensuring that the entire supply chain is transparent about its impact on the planet.
Sham noted that he is glad to see global brands as big as L’Oreal stepping up to take on that issue on behalf of their consumers. However, as the following point demonstrates, there is still much to be done across the industry if we are to live up to consumer expectations.
Transparency and openness
Building upon Pritchard’s point, Sham noted that, for all the agreements that brands and agencies have signed up to around Ad Net Zero, some are still reticent to share the data that allows us to track progress.
He said: “For many years, [the priority] was bigger data. That hasn't gone away, but our ability to measure the impact that your companies are having when they do this is pretty limited at the moment.
“We really need industry collaboration to push all these companies to agree on what they can share, what they’re comfortable sharing, what everybody will share equally… so that we can evaluate them properly.”
That transparency is related to a bigger issue – getting buy-in across the whole industry. Achieving Net Zero requires collaboration across the entire advertising ecosystem, and these measurements help unify the industry around this essential goal. By encouraging all players to prioritize sustainability and to integrate it as any media performance indicator within the reports, we can center Ad Net Zero as a mission for our industry.
But as Bernie noted, that first requires a willingness to share the key data that keeps our industry in alignment.
Optimization and automation
The panel noted that there are still perceived obstacles for brands looking to take steps towards sustainability. Sham pointed out that many brands still believe they would need to fundamentally alter their working practices to factor sustainability into their KPIs.
However, he also stated that sustaintech and ad tech providers are increasingly compensating for that through automation, taking the onus off advertisers’ internal teams: “What we looked at was around automation in optimizing for for environmental factors, so really taking the resource work out of it and making it all a sort of seamless process that is very much integrated into general optimization.
“You just add another factor so you can optimize towards reality or your conversions, but also for your environmental goals at the same time without really changing your processes.”
Pritchard said: “It is an additional string to their bow, it is an additional thing they need to learn. There’s an element of making it attractive and simple, even for people within your company.”
Ultimately the responsibility for championing sustainability is shared across the entire industry. With obstacles on the road to sustainability constantly cropping up, however, it requires that the industry pull together to overcome them.