Join the experts at Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. Stay ahead of the shifts impacting the media landscape and gain fresh strategies to drive platform growth. Save 20% on passes.
Ad Net Zero, a global initiative to curb the advertising industry’s climate impact, will take over sole ownership of an ongoing effort to standardize media decarbonization.
The Global Media Sustainability Framework was previously a joint effort between ANZ and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media (or GARM), a nonprofit that was disbanded last week after it was targeted in an anti-trust lawsuit from X.
ANZ leadership said the change isn’t likely to slow down efforts to build out the framework. Working groups will continue to meet after a planned summer break.
“We do need to regroup. We do need to put in place a slightly different personnel,” Anthony Falco, global director of ANZ, said. “There’ll be a slight pause while we’re figuring that out, but it won’t even be a momentary one, and the work will continue with the same priorities that we had previously.”
GARM and Ad Net Zero released the first part of the Global Media Sustainability Framework in June at the Cannes Lions Festival, including methodologies for measuring carbon emissions from digital, TV, and out-of-home advertising.
Working groups are also establishing standardized measurements for print, cinema, and audio, which will be released in the coming months as planned, said Falco.
A delicate power balance
The industry has been working toward standards for measuring the carbon emissions from digital media for over two years, and the path to this summer’s framework wasn’t exactly smooth.
Early efforts toward standardizing measurement were stalled by agencies that had invested heavily in carbon calculators and methodologies.
Brands, under pressure from looming emissions reporting requirements like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, were able to push for faster progress through the WFA’s participation in the process.
There’s some risk that the WFA’s lack of participation moving forward could return conversations to a gridlock of conflicting interests from advertising holding companies. Falco told ADWEEK that ANZ’s members are “way past that.”