Most people say they want to live more sustainably, but are they actually making purchasing decisions based on sustainability? Has the pandemic upended some consumer tradeoffs? The drive toward more sustainable buying hasn’t just been stalled, it’s been set back by carbon footprint and wasteful purchases. The economy shut down, decreasing carbon emissions temporarily, but we have developed other habits, including consuming more packaging. Delivery, packaging and germophobic behavior during the pandemic made single-use throwaways okay again. How can we…

The first ARF Town Hall of 2021 was a focused hour on Ad Measurement’s New Identity Challenge. Brands and publishers are grappling with the impending end of third-party cookies and the loss of mobile IDs, which could portend massive changes in the digital ad ecosystem. These tectonic shifts in tracking consumers can be puzzling, but the solutions are equally complex, and can be bucketed into three approaches: Cohorts (such as Google’s Privacy Sandbox solution), Contextual and First Party Collaborative Data…

This Town Hall presented a collaboration between several of the industry’s leading organizations — the ARF, the 4A’s, 9th Decimal, Ad-ID, CIMM, Comscore, IAB/Tech Lab, Innovid, IRI, iSpot, Kantar, LiveRamp, Nielsen, SMI and others — to create a standardized file format for ad metadata and the use of Ad-ID as the primary identifier for ads across both the TV and digital ecosystem. Current processes lack standardization and create a lot of “make work” to clean and standardize data, as well…