Lauren WakefieldFor as long as the environmental impact of media buying has featured as a topic of discussion within the digital advertising ecosystem, there have been calls for standardisation of the way the carbon footprint of digital media products is estimated. Indeed, the lack of standards has consistently ranked as a top challenge preventing progress on sustainability according to our annual State of Readiness report.
In 2024, we published the Mapping of GHG Estimation Solutions - a report that confirmed the presence of important methodological differences between frameworks and solutions used by the ecosystem to estimate the environmental impact of campaigns. Since late 2023, our Sustainability Standards Committee has been working closely with other industry bodies to support the formation of robust, practical, and representative standard methodology that enables ecosystem players to understand the carbon footprint associated with digital ad spend.
The below document contains the proposal formulated by our Sustainability Standards Committee’s ESG Methodology & Framework Working Group for the methodology used to estimate digital ad emissions in Ad Net Zero’s Global Media Sustainability Framework.
