Publishers haven’t yet been briefed on the dashboard, but in theory, “Anything free for publishers to help them understand and mitigate emissions from their programmatic ad supply chain in principle is a good thing,” said Gerson Barnett, founder of consultancy Right Thing Media.

Aligning with GARM

Good-Loop has overhauled the methodology for the Good Measures product to fully align with the new Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework, the long-awaited scope 3 measurement standards, announced this week at Cannes.

For Good-Loop, the new framework marks a massive departure in its methodology.

Where the tech vendor previously measured scope 3 emissions by electricity transmissions—for instance, the electricity used by the servers that run a demand-side platform that powers the ad buying—GARM’s framework counts the embodied emissions of all middlemen as scope 3. This incorporates emissions from the cradle-to-grave lifespan of all parties, said Luttrell.

Under this new framework, it found that 75% of energy consumption is in embodied emissions, added Luttrell.

With Good Measures enhanced to align with GARM standards, advertisers can now feed their campaign data into the platform, and Good-Loop will supplement the baseline GARM measures with a more bespoke view of the carbon signature of each ad served. These are based on emission factors like server location, user location, Wi-Fi usage, device and time-in-view.

The company said Good Measures has previously helped brands achieve up to 47% carbon reduction on in-flight campaigns, letting advertisers save over 20 tons of CO2 per campaign—the equivalent of driving 50,000 miles. It wasn’t able to share more specifics on these numbers.