The second-annual Green Media Summit at New York’s Javits Center last week showed the promise of greener pastures for marketers and customers concerned about harmful business practices overheating the planet. Leaders within the adtech industry gathered to discuss latest tools and techniques that lead to more sustainable digital promoting.
“This yr, our aim was to place a robust emphasis on actionable insights on the core of our discussions,” said Benoit Skinazi, CMO at Sharethrough, the programmatic adtech company hosting the event. “We were fortunate to feature industry leaders, climate experts, and storytellers who generously shared their experiences and proposals for constructing a greener media ecosystem.”
Why we care. Clearly, there’s a disconnect between environmentally conscious consumers who want to buy green and stakeholders who think “ESG is a four-letter word.” Implementing a sustainable adtech solution is an element of adopting a bigger environmental mission that brands can communicate proudly to customers. But these improvements have to make business sense as well.
“For broader adoption of environmentally friendly digital promoting, it’s crucial to promote the tangible advantages of green media products more vigorously,” Skinazi said. “As Martin Brian from IPG has aptly put it, we’d like to display that ‘purpose and profits’ are indeed compatible.”
Green adtech tool. At the summit, sustainable adtech company Scope3 introduced the GMP+ green media offering. By cutting out wasteful ads, it goals to bring efficiency to the ad supply chain, saving dollars and emissions for advertisers.
GMP+ is a standardized media offering that protects advertisers from wasteful programmatic ad placements. Ads that load outside the viewable area of a browser or reload regularly are examples of the digital ads GMP+ helps advertisers avoid because they waste money and increase the advertiser’s carbon footprint.
Flagging these ads is feasible due to the Global Placement ID (GPID) standard. Sharethrough is the primary adtech partner to make GMP+ available to media buyers and publishers through its programmatic platform.
The GMP+ improves on a previous iteration that reduced emissions by 25% by cutting out high-emission web sites from the ad supply chain.
“[GMP+] creates a win-win situation,” said Skinazi. “It enables advertisers to place their ads on higher-quality inventory that’s more efficient and has a lower carbon footprint. This approach not only delivers improved performance but in addition further reduces the environmental impact of advertisements.
Mastercard making team green. The adtech supply chain is an element of a bigger system that firms can impact by changing how they do business. Mastercard took steps to align internal ESG goals with worker performance. In 2021 they implemented an ESG bonus for executives. In 2022 they expanded the initiative by tying ESG goals to the performance rating for all employees, including those in marketing.
“Sustainability isn’t any longer a nice-to-have,” said Kellyanne Perez-Vera, sustainability manager, global media at Mastercard. “It is something that, going forward, everybody goes to be required to do since it’s the precise thing to do…From an worker perspective, they will see that their company is tying compensation and goals and every thing to this. The company morale was super blissful and everybody is basically engaged.”
HSBC Bank aligning green operations with portfolio. HSBC Bank adopted a net-zero approach not only internally but by measuring the emissions of its investments as well. The company pledged its operations will probably be net zero by 2030, and its portfolio by 2050.
To get there, HSBC Bank monitors “scope 3” emissions, that are created by the corporate’s value chain and never just the corporate itself. (The company Scope3’s name is a nod to this term.)
“Our operations are fairly lean,” said Matthew Cullinen, HSBC Bank’s VP of worldwide sustainability. “For us as a bank, our scope 3 emissions are finance emissions. So all of your emissions as clients, that’s our scope 3 emissions, in addition to our 20,000 suppliers for various things we purchase. Fifty percent of our energy now comes from renewables. We have a goal of 90% by 2025 which is difficult, but we’re well on our way to achieving that.”
Curbing marketing emissions. “We’re a financial services company so our scope 3 initiatives aren’t necessarily [what they would be for] consumer packaged goods, but that also doesn’t stop us,” said Mastercard’s Perez-Vera. “We do see that the majority of our emissions comes from marketing and we’re tackling that head-on. You have to dive in and do the most effective you may with the tools and knowledge you have got.”
She added: “When you actually break out carbon emissions [in marketing], every thing has a carbon footprint. Your media team has to get to work, your transportation has a carbon footprint. Going into the constructing during which you have got a strategic meeting, lighting that constructing and that specific room, has a carbon footprint. So, what we’re doing as best as possible is vetting what tools, what products, what teams might help us in actually reducing, which might be tricky. And yes, digital is a hotspot, so it’s being intentional about our media and our production shoots to be certain that we’re essentially being as optimal as possible.”
Green venue. The Green Media Summit was held within the Pavilion on the Farm on the Javits Center. The venue sits by the most important green roof in New York state, housing a one-acre working farm and 6.75 green acres total.
Dig deeper: Adtech’s climate change: Can marketing cool the planet?
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