Direct Mail Still Delivers

As part of its ongoing efforts to help mitigate greenwashing on Madison Avenue, the Institute for Advertising Ethics (IAE) is exploring the creation of a new industry entity that would help develop common standard and guidelines the ad industry can use to self-regulate the practice. The entity, dubbed “Common Consortium for Greenwashing Prevention” (CCGP) was disclosed in a letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission this morning, in response to the commission’s request for public comments to update the agency’s own “Green Guides” for the use of environmental marketing claims, which followed several congressional hearings last last year on the practice of greenwashing campaigns developed by major ad agencies and PR firms for fossil fuel marketers.

Months after rolling out a carbon calculator to estimate and influence the carbon impact of digital media buys, GroupM this morning unveiled a new version capable of measuring the carbon footprint of its client's media buys across various media -- both digital and analog. The new "Channel-Level Carbon Calculator" was developed in partnership with carbon impact researcher Scope3, and GroupM currently is working with it to engineer a new media-planning API (applications protocol interface) that any agency or advertiser will be able to integrate into their media-processing tech stack to seamlessly ingest Scope3's data in order to adjust their media mix or specific suppliers that do a better job of complying with their goals of reducing carbon emissions in their advertising and media buys. While GroupM will have a "first-to-market" access to the API for a period of time, the WPP unit said the plan is for it to be "open source" for the entire industry to use.

Google has reversed a decision on its more than five-year plan to phase out third-party cookies. The company announced Tuesday that it will keep third-party cookies in their current form and will not roll out a stand-alone "user-choice" button in Privacy Sandbox that would have allowed users to opt out of being tracked by advertisers. After careful consideration and testing, Google will keep its current approach to offer users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not roll out a new stand-alone prompt for third-party cookies, Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox at Google, wrote in a blog post. "Users can continue to choose the best option for themselves in Chrome’s Privacy and Security Settings," Chavez wrote.