Industry Bodies
Helping the ad industry deliver on its full potential to support businesses and people to deal with this emergency and build a more sustainable future. The climate emergency is a global matter, and as a global industry, we need global solutions. Ad Net Zero is the advertising industry’s drive to decarbonise the production, distribution, and publication of advertising.
Ad Net Zero’s aims are aligned with AOP members and have a five point action plan:
Ad Net Zero have Foundational Pathway to show that members are taking the necessary steps to decarbonise their business and advertising operations and are helping to promote more sustainable products, services, and behaviours. In partnership with PwC, we have designed a set of questions to help us understand the progress your organisation is making across the Ad Net Zero 5-Point Action Plan.
Global Alliance for Responsible Media recognize the role that advertisers can play in collectively pushing to improve the safety of online environments. Together, they are collaborating with publishers and platforms to do more to address harmful and misleading media environments; and to develop and deliver against a concrete set of actions, processes and protocols for protecting brands.
The GARM framework is primarily for the Advertising Industry and is focused on environment and sustainability and does not include any DEI statements, but we have utilised the relevant statements and actions for our AOP members.
“Today no industry standard exists, and the acceleration of standards is of highest priority for GARM to enable”. AOP and its members support and agree with GARM that standardised GHG measurement is key.
This provides a simple and transparent framework based around four core questions that advertisers can use to understand how well the platforms are enforcing their policies in the context of the brand safety floor.
The PPA Action Net Zero Pathway was set up for the Publishing Industry to play a role in reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHGe). With the PPA Action Net Zero Pathway, the PPA and its signatories aim to decarbonise the publishing industry and achieve net zero emissions across the sector by 2050.
Signatories of the PPA Action Net Zero Pathway commit to work and deliver on five actions, grouped under three categories: Reduce, Influence, Promote.
AOP members are in the communication industry and have the opportunity to profoundly impact the challenge and we agree with the PPA that “publishers can play a leading role in reporting the urgency and economic imperative of addressing the climate emergency and in communicating optimistic and accessible solutions to their audiences.”
The AOP and its members endorse and support the ambitions of significant reductions to proactively drive for NetZero.
Established in 2014, the IAB Technology Laboratory (Tech Lab) is a non-profit consortium that engages a member community globally to develop foundational technology and standards that enable growth and trust in the digital media ecosystem. Comprised of digital publishers, ad technology firms, agencies, marketers, and other member companies, IAB Tech Lab focuses on solutions for brand safety and ad fraud; identity, data, and consumer privacy; ad experiences and measurement; and programmatic effectiveness.
The focus for IAB tech labs is on a sustainable programmatic marketplace and notes that for advertising technology companies, data centres typically account for the highest percentage of energy use.
Businesses submit information about what actions they are taking when it comes to environmental sustainability via a comprehensive online questionnaire (see appendix). The answers are publicly available via an online tool on the IAB’s website with the aim of improving transparency in this space and inspiring others to adopt similar practices.
The FAQs are publicly available and can be accessed by brands, agencies, as well as the public. Questions that highlight a company’s environmental sustainability objectives, their approach to measure and reduce energy usage, and the initiatives in place to lower their carbon footprint. Longer term, this will also help us identify where standards need to be raised and how we might work together as an industry to achieve this.
This gives AOP members a clear idea of the questions being asked around sustainability.
All In is the industry’s initiative to improve inclusion and representation within UK advertising, created by the Advertising Association, the IPA, and ISBA.
First launched in 2021, the All In Census is UK advertising’s only industry-wide survey of its kind, developed with Kantar.
All In has focused on DEI and has multiple relevant suggestions and resources all of which we have linked to in the hub.
AOP and its members recognise that “we are tackling large and long-standing issues and that we can’t do everything at once.” We support their plan “to provide focus and clarity on each of the characteristics we analysed in the research and, systematically, work to create a compendium of guidance that will make advertising and marketing the leading area in Inclusion.”