NEW YORK – Advertising agencies are broadening their mandates to limit the negative effect of marketing activities on the Earth’s natural resources. Amid those efforts, suppliers of services throughout the marketing supply chain are looking to help reduce its carbon footprint.
“We’ve been taking a really big approach to sustainability at Sharethrough since…the end of 2021 when we started learning just around how much carbon emissions the advertising industry is responsible for,” Frank Maguire, vice president of insights, strategy and sustainability at digital advertising platform Sharethrough, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Mike Shields at Advertising Week New York. “Instead of just kind of like burying our heads in the sand and doing nothing about it, we were like: ‘well, let’s do something.’”
The process includes an analysis of supply chains and classifying activities into three areas:
- Scope 1 covers direct emissions from a company’s own or controlled sources, such as fuel burning, waste processing or equipment leaks.
- Scope 2 emissions are the indirect emissions from the energy purchased and used by a company, such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning and electricity.
- Scope 3 emissions are the indirect emissions from a company’s value chain such as ad-tech vendors, waste disposal and transportation.
“We know the whole supply chain that it takes to deliver an ad from a brand to agency to DSP, SSP, DMP — kind of everything that’s involved in that where a lot of other industries don’t have that understanding,” Maguire said. “It’s going take them a lot longer to reduce the emissions and reach net zero and we’re gonna do some education around that as well.”
