🔊 One martech firm tackles its carbon emissions

Climate and the environment were topics Smartly.io, the social advertising platform, had felt strongly about for some time, but it was the changes wrought by the pandemic that spurred the Smartly team into action. “The events of last year provided a new sense of awareness of the impact of some of our activities as a business would be affecting the environment, or the world in general,” said Robert Rothschild, Smartly’s CMO, VP and global head of marketing.

Smartly decided to partner with Compensate, a nonprofit that helps companies measure, reduce and offset carbon emissions. “We had an opportunity to leverage their expertise, their ability to manage the calculation of the carbon footprint in the most scientifically accurate and efficient way,” Rothschild said.

Compensate charges fees for its service, but channels that revenue into support for both traditional and innovative carbon capture projects — the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Compensate clients like Smartly can “overcompensate” by supporting the eradication of more CO2 than their own activities create. “In our case, we actually purchased and retired more than 10,000 carbon credits,” said Rothschild, “which enabled the removal of over 6,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.”

The largest source of Smartly’s carbon footprint turned out to be business travel. The plan is to reduce those emissions by considering what volume of travel is urgent and necessary, and looking at alternatives to air travel.

Why we care. We might not consider the martech and adtech industries to be big contributors to carbon emissions — unless, that is, we count the reliance any cloud-based business has on server farms — but Smartly.io’s initiative is a reminder that any company has it in its power to reduce (or compensate for) its carbon footprint.

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When it comes to the technologies marketers say they would most likely cut, keep or buy if faced with a budget decrease, interestingly B2B marketing automation showed up in both the “keep” and the “cut” columns, as some respondents found them essential and others thought they could do without them. Gartner Senior Director Analyst Colin Reid, who delivered the insight at the company’s latest Marketing Symposium/Xpo, noted that this split was largely along B2B versus B2C lines, with companies focused largely on B2B putting the technology in the “keep” column.

Analysts also highlighted the martech practices of high-performing brands, noting that: “No single technology product, save web analytics and digital marketing tag management, was adopted by 100% of Genius and Gifted brands. Instead, brands with high digital intelligence and complex martech stacks combine some of the core marketing technologies for analytics, data management, advertising, personalization and multichannel marketing.”

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Marketing automation platforms form the backbone of marketing operations, increasingly serving as sophisticated marketing orchestration platforms. MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms. This report includes profiles of 13 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons, pricing information, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.

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One in five fake e-commerce listings came from just 3% of repeat offenders, a new study from brand protection company Incopro found. Eliminating this cohort of illicit sellers couldn’t prevent up to $78 billion in annual losses for brands.

The study resulted from statistical analysis of 1.5 million IP enforcements across over 750 brands. They looked at 34 platforms, including popular marketplaces and social sites, and determined that a strictly enforced “three strikes” policy on offending fake posters would protect brands and consumers alike.

Incopro makes two baseline recommendations for e-commerce marketplaces:

Currently, according to Incopro, 68% of the selling platforms they surveyed have some policy in place to root out repeat offenders. Only three of the platforms (Alibaba, Aliexpress and Taobao) go as far as banning the illicit sellers.

Why we care. Why wouldn’t e-commerce marketplaces and social platforms want to build trust between sellers and consumers? As big brands focus more of their strategies on social commerce, they have to be assured that the environment is safe for their brand and not wasteful to their bottom line.

Join us online, June 15-16, at SMX Advanced — the premier training experience designed exclusively for expert search marketers. Explore the latest SEO, PPC, and user experience topics, trends, and tactics with the Search Engine Land editors!

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With Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policies going live yesterday, iOS users will now be prompted to accept or decline sharing data across apps. Because of these changes, Google is updating the way they report and measure conversion information for ads service on iOS14.

Here are some of the details for advertisers promoting web-based conversion goals:

The support piece by Christophe Combette, Group Product Manager, Google Ads also dives into how advertisers that are promoting iOS apps may see changes as well.

On Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy: “This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because it’s making Facebook sweat,” Gennie Gebhart, Associate Director of Research, Electronic Frontier Foundation