Minimise carbon emissions: keep ad campaign performance

It is no secret that the digital advertising industry is in the process of taking a long, hard look at its sustainability credentials. Research has shown that the internet is a vast polluter, contributing about 2% to 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year (roughly the same as the aviation industry). 

The digital advertising industry alone produces about 215,000 metric tons of carbon emissions each month across five major global economies (USA, UK, Australia, Germany, and France). That’s the equivalent of 24 million gallons of gasoline. Clearly, as an industry we have a responsibility to bring that number down significantly.

Adaptive streaming is becoming a core component in the campaign for climate impact mitigation in digital advertising, and growers’ cooperative Zespri Group, based in New Zealand (together with SeenThis and their media agency, Mindshare), is a recent proponent. As an agricultural business, Zespri has a huge interest in advancing its sustainable practices, and by streaming their ads using our tech they were able to transfer an estimated 39% less data. This resulted in an estimated 12% lower carbon emissions from creative delivery.

And this didn’t come at the expense of advertising performance: the campaign’s best-performing ads experienced video start rates of 85%, and completion rates of 77%.

Adaptive streaming — what is it?

Adaptive streaming offers the ability to stream ad creative to the consumer, rather than requiring the advert to download to a device before it is viewable. This is done by only sending creative data when the ad is viewable for a consumer, while also adjusting the delivery based on that consumer’s conditions. This minimises data transfer (and wastage), and means that ads load instantly, providing a minimal (negative) impact on website performance. Adaptive streaming works for both video and static ads.

How adaptive streaming works

Ad creative is optimised for a fast and smooth delivery with high quality, which means that campaign performance is positively affected, offering a higher number of views and greater user experience. Given video content is becoming increasingly popular with consumers, it’s more important than ever that adaptive streaming technology can deliver rich media without compromising on quality.

This is possible thanks to adaptive streaming, which enables us to take much more control over the video data throughout our value chain, from receiving the original video from our client all the way to delivering the last piece of data package to the end user. And of course, as we live in a privacy-first era, adaptive streaming technology doesn’t use cookies or require any personal data to target an audience — it is a future-proof technology.

Calculating carbon

Integral to SeenThis’ particular offering is its efficient data transfer technology. This helped Zespri minimise their advertising campaign’s carbon footprint and, just as importantly, measure and estimate its avoided impact. The technology works in real-time to analyse in detail each and every ad campaign.

An emissions dashboard presents the results, providing insights that include the quantity of data transferred and footprint for each campaign, and an estimation of the quantity of data waste avoided (and thereby carbon emissions) is also included. The dashboard also supplies real-world comparisons, ones Zespri have used to illustrate the positive impact of adopting the technology. 

Also published in: Mediacat Magazine