UniLED has collaborated with OPEN Media, Electric Glue and Starling Bank to trial a new Digital Out of Home (DOOH) Screen Energy and Emissions Report.
This is the first time that ‘in-use’ DOOH screen energy use and emissions have been recorded live, in-situ, and reported at a campaign level and by audience impact, for a brand and media agency.
The DOOH Screen Energy and Emissions Reporting functionality is being developed in the UniLIVE platform by UniLED, in response to an urgent need by the media industry to accurately measure and reduce its environmental impact. Its aim is to provide a singular, agreed methodology to capture a more efficient and accurate picture of the energy usage of a DOOH campaign. This will assist vendors in identifying the most significant drivers of screen energy consumption and help make more targeted reductions. To make this effective industry-wide, UniLED has issued a ‘call to action’ for more media owners and vendors to agree to share energy consumption data.
DOOH screens are one of the largest, most visible and most trusted media formats on the market with a long legacy of innovation, funding and action to improve their environmental impact. However, as a result of inaccurate media energy emissions reporting, or media carbon calculators relying on estimations and incomparable methodologies that can provide a distorted picture, they are often victims of inaccurate assumptions about their energy consumption.
Brands, media owners and agencies are continuously looking for ways, not only to reduce their carbon footprint but also to adhere to multiple industry and company ESG, Climate or Net Zero pledges and promises. Not forgetting the regulatory reporting needs of the C-Suite.
What brands, media agencies and owners really need urgent help with is being able to measure and report more accurately by having access to factually correct information. This will help them identify and focus on the priority actions to significantly reduce their media energy emissions.
Abigail Cunningham at UniLED Software said, “The industry is working in silos to address this problem, and making progress in isolation but what we all need, to address climate change, is collaboration and transformative action now.”
UniLED is currently inviting agency partners, media owners and industry stakeholders to feedback on the first trial methodology. It is inviting collaboration to agree on consistent metrics and outputs and share learnings while continuing to develop the UniLIVE platform to efficiently process, analyse and verify the data.
The next stage in the development of the Energy Reporting Platform is to ingest more of the available data and test campaign variables. This will help UniLED to produce learnings and guidelines with the aim of helping the DOOH industry make significant reductions in the emissions from ‘In Use’ DOOH screens, without reducing campaign quality and performance for advertisers.
