Tech vendor Good-Loop—with a mantra of building ad solutions that have a more positive impact on the world—is letting publishers use its carbon measurement, reduction and recommendations product, Good Measures for Publishers, for free. Advertisers pay $5,000 monthly to access Good Measures.
Publishers can sign up for an emissions audit now with the tool launching in August, it announced at the Cannes Lions Festival.
“We must stop telling advertisers that they are reducing their emissions by blocking publishers, that is wrong and factually incorrect,” Will Luttrell, chief technology officer at Good-Loop told ADWEEK. “When you block publishers you have done nothing to decrease your own carbon emissions.”
Publishers have been irked at being overly penalized by advertisers’ attempts to go green on two counts. Third-party tech vendors like Good-Loop and Scope3 have introduced tech layers for brands to block higher-carbon emitting publishers (without telling those publishers), restricting them from earning ad revenue. Some tech vendors then charge publishers a fee to either reduce emissions or get them off the naughty list, added Luttrell.
Carbon blocklists have impacted a much smaller portion of publisher revenue than brand safety blocklists.
Good-Loop’s recommendations
In the dashboard, publishers will see factors in their scope 3 emissions (which differ from advertiser emissions) including page weight, number of ad units and sell-side supply path analysis. Scope 3 emissions include those from the supply chain, not owned or controlled by the advertiser. For some digital media companies, this accounts for 95% of emissions.
Reduction recommendations will include criteria like trimming the weight of the page, reducing font files or ad slots and ways to declutter the site.
Instead of offering buyers a blocklist, Good-Loop will let them know there is a top 25% of publishers that have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions.
Alternatives like Scope3 offer some free access for publishers like their percentile ranking for emissions compared with other web properties, as well as emissions over time and supply paths. It offers more details for a fee.
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 (DSP) that powers the ad buying—GARM’s framework counts the embodied emissions of all middlemen as scope 3. That 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 supplements 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, wifi usage, device and time-in-view.
The company said that 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.