The ad business is also on a mission, like many other industries to reduce its carbon footprint. The focus was on partial evaluations, such as calculating emissions for an online campaign or a technology partnership. They are important steps but only the start.
It is only when you look at the big picture, the overall total of advertising emissions that the real game-changer occurs. It includes all ads, campaigns and partners involved throughout the year.
“This is happening more now because a lot of companies have net zero ambitions but in order to meet those goals they need to get data back from their supply chains, including advertising,” said Eric Shih chief operating officer of Cedara, a software-as-a-service provider that marketers employ to measure the carbon emissions of their media supply chains.
It’s difficult to get that information in a sector that measures carbon emissions. Let alone one without standardized standards and that does not. It’s not impossible, but it is difficult when you consider that marketers are often forced to look through keyholes at the online advertising supply chains.
Marketers have been forced to use estimates in order to measure their advertising outputs. Estimates are fine as a short-term fix, but they don’t provide the metrics that will allow for real accountability.
Shih said: “It would be like counting how many offices are inside a building based on the number windows that surround it. It’s wildly inaccurate.”
Shih believes that the best approach is to look at the layout of a building. He continued that only after this can changes be made, or — in the cases of marketing — can organizations make necessary carbon emission reductions.
What you see is what you get Sanofi’s Head of Media said He outlined his company’s approach at the beginning of the year to determining how environmentally friendly its marketing is. Other Advertisers are also affected by this.They turn to businesses like Cedara SeenThis Multilocal, and other companies for assistance.
As brands advance in sustainability, this kind of measure is being included into their briefs, said Joseph Worswick. Worswick was the vp for buyer development at OpenX and also head of sustainability. OpenX claimed to be the first net zero adtech company.
These briefs often pose some difficult questions. The briefs often include some tough questions. They want to know the breakdown of total impressions that firms manage, including all bidstream activities by factors such as creative, device, and location. Marketers are asking about the emissions of ad-tech vendors such as OpenX, and not just ads. They ask questions like how much energy it takes to run its data centres, or electricity required to support ad campaigns.
Marketers can then start to focus on the amount of carbon that an impression produces. The more that they can do this throughout their entire programmatic supply chains, the easier will it be to establish the benchmarks necessary to reduce their emissions.
Steven Filler is the country manager for the U.K. of video platform ShowHeroes.
The conclusion that many of those who have done this at the same time seem to be coming to is: audience targeting can not only lead to regrettable advertising results if it’s overused but also to unnecessary carbon waste. Sustainability will also be an optimization tool, just as a trader considers the time, day of the week, audience size, website, ad type, and bidding.
There’s a way to go before then, of course. It’s easy to envision a future where sustainability will play a major role in the way marketers purchase their advertising and who they buy it from. Focusing on sustainability can even address programmatic advertising’s biggest challenges.
Take the problem of duplicate bids, as it not only distorts competition but wastes time and energy while compromising auction integrity. Armed with the right insights, advertisers might prefer programmatic marketplaces that enforce a one-placement-one-bid rule, streamlining both open market and deals trading.
A similar situation exists with the complex web of resellers created by adtech vendors who buy and sell ad inventories amongst each other, complicating the supply chain. The push for sustainability may encourage marketers to bypass these vendors in favor of a direct path — from the publisher, to the exchange and to the demand-side platform.
There’s also the issue of websites created for advertising. These sites are notorious for their carbon emissions, emitted by 26% higher. Carbon is cheaper than its reputable counterparts. The push towards sustainability, as the marketing industry becomes more aware of the impact it has on the environment, could be another reason for them to move away from energy-intensive methods.
TrustX is a firm that sells advertising space and they believe this as well. The company runs private advertising marketplaces that are about half as environmentally friendly as other supply-side platforms. Scope3 audited.
Recently, other companies have also started to advertise their efforts in promoting an eco-friendly environment.
Take the contextual advertising business, Pixability. The company is working in conjunction with Cedara, to provide advertisers an easy way to track the carbon footprint of their YouTube ad campaigns and adjust spending accordingly. Epson is one of the advertisers who appears to have already reaped benefits.
The campaigns conducted in collaboration with the two firms between September and January last year not only gained high visibility, with the ads potentially being seen 230,000,000 times on YouTube, but they also increased traffic from YouTube to Epson’s website by 60 percent during that period.
These campaigns are designed to be environmentally friendly. Cedara found that by choosing shorter ads over longer ones the impact on the environment was dramatically reduced. These ads were four times more environmentally friendly. The bumper ads were found to be the least harmful for the environment, as they produced very little CO2.
Celine Craipeau said, “We’ve chosen to concentrate our efforts as an agency on media purchasing online because of the energy intensity.” Vp of Sustainability at JellyFish, a digital agency. We want to reach a point in the next few years where we can deliver carbon budgets for each client project and have more of our production centered around sustainable projects.
The shift is part of an overall reevaluation by companies on how they can achieve corporate sustainability goals.
As reported by Business Insider Early this year,
It doesn’t seem like they are renouncing any previous commitments. They’ve just realized that the road to zero net is not guaranteed.
Filler said that 2024 will be the tipping point in terms of sustainability for advertising. As more brands, agencies, and publishers demand their vendors demonstrate sustainability at all stages of media supply chains, Filler predicted.