No Better Time Than Now

Building adland’s sustainable future

Technology has exploded since the turn of the century. Every year tech blossoms with new, exciting ideas and trends that just a few years ago, we couldn’t have even imagined.

The positive impacts of the digital age on the environment are frequently noted: better connectivity means fewer commutes and less air travel, and emerging tech allows us to better measure and assist in the use of resources. But this evolution has also drenched an issue to the surface that has flown under the sustainability radar for a long time: the digital advertising sector is under scrutiny.

As it should. Internet usage accounts for 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse gases each year, about 4% of the total emissions worldwide. Online advertising also contributes around 10-20% of the total internet infrastructure’s energy consumption – and with the rise of programmatic, we now also need to factor in emissions for the trillions of automated ad auctions that take place every day. And at the far end of the pipeline, increased emissions from “advertised emissions”, aka emissions generated by sales from advertising, add around 28% to every individual’s carbon footprint each year.

What this means is that tech leaders also need to evolve. Not just to future-proof their own businesses, but also to create a more sustainable future for the industry – and the world – as a whole. 

Three recent improvements in the industry’s sustainability game

‘Sustainable’ has become a buzzword but there’s more to it than jargon.

SeenThis’ Susan Kravitz, head of commercial partnerships, Americas, says the best thing to do is to put the jargon down. “I always tell people to step back and take all those words and put them in a drawer,” says Susan. “If advertisers want to start making a difference they need to keep it simple and ask: what is it that we are trying to do?”

Susan believes that businesses should start reframing the way they actually tackle the issue of sustainability in advertising. “It’s not just, ‘what can I do?’.  It’s more, ‘what can we do as an industry - together?’”

Luckily, the scrutiny the sector has received has also given rise to a wealth of solutions to pave the way for a future we can all thrive in.

The first of these is climate initiatives. Recent initiatives such as Ad Net Zero have sprung to life – an industry-wide initiative that seeks to reduce digital media's net carbon emissions to zero by 2030. SeenThis are among more than 80 companies to join the initiative so far, and supported the start of its expansion into the US in 2023. 

The second instance where adland has been scrutinising and successfully taking steps towards sustainability goals is in the supply chain. The Responsible Marketing Agency knows that one of the largest impact paths to sustainability is SPO – Supply Path Optimisation.

SPO is more beneficial than just in the context of sustainability; it also provides a multitude of opportunities for maximising marketing budget and media productivity. But as well as providing substantial opportunities for increased efficiency, it has the added benefit of being brilliantly sustainable – to put it simply, removing unproductive media inventory removes some of the highest carbon emitters.

Other companies, such as curation specialists Multilocal, have taken an incentive-first approach to sustainability with performance-enhancing innovations like their CarbonSmart solution. Historically, each single impression within a Private Marketplace generates millions of ad calls from the publisher, and millions more bid requests from the SSP. ““Advertisers, agencies and SSPs are understandably concerned at the level of carbon emissions being generated through programmatic ad campaigns,” explains Fern Potter, SVP Strategy and Partnerships at Multilocal.

But CarbonSmart delivers high-performance ad campaigns that produce low emissions, validated by leading carbon intelligence platform, Cedara. “We wanted to offer an innovative curation product that allows campaign managers to reach their sustainability goals without compromising on performance,” says Fern. “In fact, by eliminating unnecessary bid transactions and streamlining the supply chain, CarbonSmart delivers even higher performance than before.”

Multilocal is now partnering with OneTag, combining their latest innovations with Supply Path Optimisation by OneTag’s DealCurate into their offering. DealCurate provides significant operational efficiency, with full and immediate control of supply-side deal creation. 

Two places adland could improve

We should be patting ourselves on the back for all the steps we’ve taken so far, but the work isn’t over. We have to manage the trade-offs of modern technologies, even those that seem sustainable at surface level.

• Spam emails are sustainability offenders

On average, a single email emits between 0.3 to 50 grams of CO2-equivalent gases. This is an insignificant amount of CO2 on its own, but the impact is greatly amplified when you consider that the projected number of emails sent a day is around 376 billion by 2025. But let’s be honest – no one is going to stop sending emails any time soon. 

The good news is, genuine emails only amount to around 18% of all email traffic per day. On the other hand, that means 82% of all emails sent, every day, are fraudulent and spam. If we really want to tackle the environmental impact of email, we need to tackle ad fraud, such as the “highly coordinated” ad fraud campaign that recently hijacked thousands of legitimate domains to send millions of fraudulent emails.

Ad fraud has given rise to organisations such as UKSAFC, who are committed to tackling all forms of advertising funded crime and fraud in the UK. With enough time and commitment, the industry can crack down on ad fraud and email emissions in one fell swoop.

• The rapid growth of AI runs rampant energy consumption risks

There are heaps of ways that the ‘AI takeover’ of the digital age has been beneficial to the climate – namely, the management, measurement and optimisation of processes that help combat climate change, such as recycling processes, weather patterns, and making transportation routes more efficient to cut travel emissions.

But all of this comes at its own carbon cost. The data centers where AI is trained in the US already account for 2% of total US energy consumption. That’s 10-50 times more energy per day than the average commercial office building. Water is a vital and finite resource, and yet ChatGPT “consumes” 500ml for every 20-50 questions it answers, equating to a massive 2,500 olympic swimming pools worth of water per year.

This secret environmental footprint behind the magic is concerning. The solutions for this require active work: Buy new, clean energy where you plan to consume it. Carefully monitor the impact of your AI usage, manage where and when your AI workload happens, without overuse just because it’s easy, and consider environmental impact as a key factor in any AI use cases. And for those developing AI programs, focus on raising efficiency.

One lesson to walk away with

If there’s anything to come away from this with, it’s focus. By all means, celebrate the sustainability wins we’ve already had, but it’s also okay to admit that adtech isn’t in the black when it comes to our climate goals. There’s a Chinese proverb that says "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." The same goes for sustainability practices. 

Focus on making small steps wherever you can. If we all concentrate our efforts on balancing our environmental impact into the core of the work we do, we can build a sustainable future for the digital advertising industry that we can be more than just proud of – we can rest assured that we’ve set up for future success.

If you want to know more about marketing responsibly, don’t miss our upcoming panel at LBB Beach in Cannes this June – “Responsible Marketing: WTAF is it?!” You can catch Responsible Marketing Agency’s Hannah Mirza, Gareth Holmes from SeenThis, Multilocal’s Fern Potter and Filippo Gramigna from OneTag live on stage, moderated by Digiday’s senior editor Seb Joseph. Not one to miss!

To find out more about the panel and LBB Beach, visit our Cannes page: https://thedigitalvoice.co.uk/cannes