The Global Media Sustainability Framework
Understanding the Industry Guidance for Measuring Advertising Emissions
20th August 2024
Insights
Because of its scale, the advertising industry has a significant environmental impact. Like all industries, it has an important role to play in global sustainability by reducing that environmental footprint.
However, despite its size and influence, the industry has faced a challenge: there hasn’t been a consistent, agreed-upon framework for measuring its environmental impact.
This lack of consistency has led to fragmented efforts and unclear benchmarks, making it difficult for businesses to accurately assess and reduce their emissions.
Without a unified measurement framework, companies often rely on different methods and metrics, leading to inconsistent and sometimes unreliable data. This inconsistency makes it hard to make like-for-like comparisons across the industry and hinders efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of advertising activities. Additionally, it complicates broader corporate sustainability strategies, including scope 3 emissions reporting.
What is the Global Media Sustainability Framework?
Developed by the WFA’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and Ad Net Zero, the Global Media Sustainability Framework aims to standardise how we measure environmental impacts across the advertising industry, using comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) guidance.
Benefits of industry-wide LCA guidance:
- Consistency and comparability: Establishes uniform metrics and methodologies, allowing for consistent and comparable data across the industry.
- Transparency: Enhances transparency in reporting, making it easier for stakeholders to understand and trust the data.
- Improved decision-making: Provides a clear basis for businesses to make informed decisions about reducing their environmental impact.
What is included in the Global Media Sustainability Framework?
- Channel Emissions Frameworks (CEFs): Provides a common voluntary framework to identify energy-consuming steps in media delivery, focusing on creation, distribution, and consumption phases. These include media emissions formulae (which can be used to calculate campaign emissions), data request guidance, and emissions data sources.
- Strategic principles: Outlines the various phases of media campaigns for quantifying emissions, emphasising the importance of including all stages, from creation to dissemination, in emissions calculations.
- Technical principles: Provides guidelines for the calculation and measurement of greenhouse gas emissions, focusing on principles such as transparency, completeness, and consistency to ensure the reliability of the data produced in accordance with established GHG accounting standards.
What media channels are covered by the Global Media Sustainability Framework?
| Current coverage | Future expansion in late 2024 |
|---|---|
| TV | Audio |
| Digital | |
| Out of home (OOH) | Cinema |
Key principles and takeaways:
- Holistic approach: The framework considers the full life cycle of advertising activities, from production to distribution and consumption.
- Data-driven: Emphasises the importance of robust data collection and analysis to ensure accurate measurements. Guidance on using the appropriate level of data (the framework defines four data levels of varying granularity).
- Continuous improvement: Encourages ongoing refinement of methods and practices to keep pace with technological and environmental changes.
What does the Global Media Sustainability Framework mean for your business?
If your company provides advertising services, the new framework enables you to measure the impacts of your emissions using a methodology that is consistent with industry best-practice. By assessing the carbon impacts of your advertising services, you can provide your customers with a carbon footprint for the services you provide, supporting their GHG reporting and journey towards net zero.
If your company procures advertising services, you can use the framework to guide you in measuring the impacts of these scope 3 activities. Additionally, it provides transparency and clarity – you can ensure that you are making fair, like-for-like comparisons where the guidance has been followed. This will improve the consistency of your scope 3 reporting and help enable you to make a robust plan to reduce those emissions.
How Anthesis can help
Anthesis can help businesses navigate the complexities of sustainability in the advertising industry. Our team of experts can guide you through the implementation of the Global Media Sustainability Framework, ensuring that your advertising activities are environmentally responsible by helping to measure and reduce their environmental impacts. Additionally, we can help you to incorporate this information into your corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory.
By adopting the Global Media Sustainability Framework, the advertising industry takes a step towards a more sustainable future. Anthesis can help guide you along this journey.
For more information on how we can support you along your sustainability journey, please contact us here.
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