Immediate Media and The GoodNet launch sustainability platform
Immediate Media has partnered ESG data company The GoodNet to launch a sustainable advertising platform.
IM Clear seeks to offer advertisers the ability to optimise media performance while also maximising ESG scores.
Immediate, the publisher of Good Food, BBC Gardeners’ World and Radio Times, among others, claims to be the first media owner to offer such a solution.
The ad platform is powered by The GoodNet’s GoodIQ data, which measures against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and will provide pre- and post-campaign ESG reporting and analysis for campaigns running against Immediate’s portfolio of brands.
This includes assessing Immediate’s content, corporate practices and technology against digital advertising benchmarks.
The measurement suite includes customised client pre-campaign recommendations and alignment with a given advertiser’s custom ESG priorities, KPI performance of ESG media vs “climate risk media”, and carbon emissions measurement and optional carbon-offsetting recommendations.
James Florence, head of advertising technology at Immediate, told The Media Leader that IM Clear is the latest step in what has been an extensive effort on behalf of the publisher to clean up its own tech stack by, among other efforts, removing unnecessary intermediaries. Today, Immediate sites rank in the top 15% of 11,000-plus domains on The GoodNet’s ESG Media Index.
“That was all really good work, but we wanted to do two things,” said Florence. “[Work with] our agency and advertiser partners to make it really easy for them to do a really sustainable campaign with us, and we also wanted us to enable the great work we’re doing with our editorial content to come to the fore.”
Apart from that, Immediate brands have sought to publish content that promotes more sustainable living practices — something that GoodIQ takes into account when calculating the ESG score of a given campaign.
“Our tool will pick up the fact that they write and produce a lot of content around responsible consumption and production content,” The GoodNet co-founder Guy Jones said. “Content is an important part of the puzzle […] It’s about saying: are my ad dollars going to support media owners and publishers that are aligned to my goals corporately?”
Speaking to The Media Leader, he added that IM Clear will consider both campaigns’ direct impact on the environment via working through “well-managed supply chains” and reduced ad clutter in combination with the effectiveness. He said that study after study has found that performance goes hand in hand with sustainability efforts.
“We see, with the partnership with [Immediate] and more broadly, that there is a really, really close correlation between [campaign] performance and more ethical buying,” Jones (pictured, left) explained.
Florence added: “We see that working directly with a publisher with a supply chain as small as ours and as well-optimised as ours, if I do say so myself, produces great results.”
The launch of IM Clear is timed to take advantage of the EU’s recently expanded Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is set to impact more businesses that will now need to measure and track ESG goals under European law.
“IM Clear is really about trying to turn interest and intent from our partners into action, to make that action easier to take,” added Florence. “This is really, we’re hoping, going to be a bit of an inflection point.”
To incentivise early adoption of the platform, Immediate is offering access to IM Clear at no addition cost beyond media spend, although it will request case studies and feedback on the tool.
Immediate is also offering a 20% discount to B Corp clients for spending on IM Clear.