The WFA’s Global Alliance For Responsible Media and Ad Net Zero have launched a guide to sustainable media for advertisers. The unveiling came at an event Thursday at the Cannes Lions Festival. The guide identifies the areas where advertisers can consider action to reduce the direct carbon emissions of their advertising activity.  

GARM Sustainability: Action Guide to Reduce Media Greenhouse Gas Emissions was unveiled during Beet.TV’s Sustainability Summit done in partnership with Ad Net Zero and the 4A’s. 

Key areas where advertisers can take action are split into four different areas including supplier selection to optimizing creative and media planning and buying.  

Among the detailed suggests are ways to reduce duplication in programmatic actions and infrastructure, create a supplier ‘greenlist’, maximizing value from existing creative and compressing digital ad formats to reduce the energy needed to play them.  

“We have much work to do to deliver real transformation across marketing including looking at common definitions, common metrics, shared tools, and independent verification but this guide is a meaningful starting point and highlights current best practice,” said Rob Rakowitz, GARM Initiative Lead.  

The new publication complements the WFA’s recent Sustainable Marketing 2030 Report, which highlights a new circular approach to marketing and identifies key levers that marketers can use to make an impact both on internal initiatives and changing consumer behavior.  

It also complements the work completed by IAB Tech Lab in its Sustainability Playbook published earlier this month.  

Ad Net Zero has introduced mandatory setting and reporting of science-based targets of all supporters (within 12 months of joining) to help accelerate the change needed across the industry. WFA, GARM and Ad Net Zero have also joined forces on an acceleration agenda to identify a standard framework for measuring media campaign carbon emissions, with target of taking it to wider industry consultation before end 2023.