3.2.3 How you deliver your client content to audiences

This is an area where the industry has developed in-depth advice and support – please refer to the guides linked below.

Carbon footprint of media delivery

The primary focus here is on the carbon footprint of how your campaigns reach their audience. In particular, the unseen footprint created by digital campaigns. This is a rapidly growing concern given the huge and growing shift towards digital media advertising.

Ethics of media partners

The secondary focus is on the ethics of the media partners, and what else they promote and whether that aligns with a cleaner, greener future and your sustainability ambition to be a Passive, Participant or Pioneer.

Suggested resources

The resources below will help guide you through the process of understanding the issues, measuring your baseline, setting targets and actions you can take to reduce the environmental impact from your media planning, buying and delivery.

• Ad Net Zero – Step 3 – provides an overview of what you need to be thinking about to reduce carbon emissions from media planning and buying
• GARM Sustainability Quick Action Guide – outlines 10 steps/actions to take to reduce emissions brought about from media campaigns
• The Global Media Sustainability Framework – A cross-industry collaboration between WFA’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and the Ad Net Zero It presents a series of voluntary industry standards to improve consistent, comparable measurement of media greenhouse gas emissions from digital, television, print, audio, outdoor and cinema channels.
• IPA Media Climate Charter – provides media agencies with the tools and resources to support their transition to a zero-carbon future. This includes a carbon calculator for media planners to calculate emissions for media advertising and a database holding information on media owners’ sustainability and climate credentials.
• IAB Sustainability Playbook – aimed at media suppliers and buyers for digital media – the playbook presents a list of items to consider when buying digital media platforms
• Dimpact – a tool created to measure, understand and ultimately reduce the emissions of serving digital media and entertainment products
• Scope 3 – provides various solutions to help plan, measure and reduce emissions in advertising by making informed choices of the platforms and channels you distribute the ads on
• SeenThis – a tech product that allows creatives to stream high-quality content (videos and images) while reducing data wastage and thus emissions
• Legacy – provides ratings to media planning platforms to help media planners to identify media partners that have high ESG scores aligned with their own aspiration
• The Good Net – Good IQ’s Ethical Media Index analyses over 50 data points to measure how sustainable a digital publisher is. Brands and agencies can then use the data to plan the use of, and measure, ethical media across all their digital ad investment.