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Fossil who? To ring in the new year on a sustainable note, Vox Media said today that it’ll no longer run ads from fossil-fuel companies.
It’s a policy the publisher has had in place since early 2021, explained AJ Frucci, Vox Media’s SVP of media revenue, but the company is now “kind of formalizing” it.
The update to the company’s advertising policy states that Vox Media no longer accepts ad dollars from fossil-fuel companies, or any companies that mine nonrenewable resources, Vox Media spokesperson Peyton McCarthy said. The policy will also extend to lobbyist groups “whose purpose is to support fossil-fuel companies.” The Guardian introduced a similar ban in 2020.
The announcement is part of a larger initiative that Vox Media, which owns publications including New York Magazine, SB Nation, and its namesake site Vox, will make in an attempt to help address the climate crisis.
Today, Vox Media also announced it would pay the cost of offsetting the carbon emissions generated by the publisher’s new “carbon-neutral” advertising inventory for its Concert advertising network, created in a partnership with Scope3, a company designed to help the ad-tech industry scale back its carbon emissions.
Advertisers buying carbon-neutral inventory will be paying only for audience impressions, with Vox paying the cost of offsetting the emissions used to reach them. Frucci declined to share the pricing of the units 🤔.
“Our business success depends on this idea...that the buy side begins prioritizing greener advertising in their campaigns and their buying decisions. And that’s the bet that we’re making,” Frucci told Marketing Brew.
Zoom out: Though Frucci declined to say how much ad revenue fossil-fuel advertisers previously contributed to Vox Media’s bottom line, it’s a heated topic in energy and climate media.
- In December, Semafor’s climate editor left the publication, writing that his short time there was “marred, sadly, by an overdependence on Chevron sponsorship.”
- Both Axios and Politico have garnered attention for running ads from fossil-fuel companies alongside coverage of the climate crisis and energy.
- Last year, Bloomberg Media’s global CMO told us that its climate vertical, Bloomberg Green, does not work with oil and gas companies.
Related, unrelated: In recent years, both Google and Pinterest have said they’re making moves to curb ads that promote false information about the climate crisis.