Mumbrella360: The dirty truth about digital advertising
Picture all the carbon emissions produced by doing laundry, whether the electricity and water needed for the wash or the lingering impacts of manufacturing the appliance itself and producing the detergent and fabric softener.
June Cheung, head of JAPAC for supply chain emissions data provider Scope3, revealed every 1,000 impressions delivered by a piece of digital advertising is the equivalent of one load of washing.
If a single campaign attracts about 150,000 impressions, that’s 150 loads. But for the countless campaigns and many millions, if not billions of eyeballs each year, that’s a lot of laundry.
Cheung, who presented a Masterclass session at Mumbrella360 on Wednesday, said many in the industry are often shocked at the carbon cost of digital ads.
“There’s a lot of surprise because you can’t see the carbon emissions in digital – it’s not tangible,” she told Mumbrella.
“With a newspaper – you can feel the paper, you can see the truck taking it from the printer to the shop… you can see it. But digital is just as dirty. Whenever an ad is made available digitally, hundreds if not thousands of vendors are called upon.”
American MarTech supremo Brian O’Kelly founded the supply side system AppNexus in 2007, which he sold to AT&T some 11 years later. During Covid, he completed a course on supply chain sustainability, which opened his eyes to the carbon emissions produced in the programmatic space.
“It was a problem no-one was thinking about,” Cheung said of her boss’s brainwave.
O’Kelly created a dataset and launched Scope3 to allow the industry to measure its impact and make more informed decisions.
“You can look at vendor A, B and C to see how they rank from an emissions standard,” Cheung explained. “Brands, marketers and CEOs have sustainability goals and are considering where they put their money. It’s not just if media is working for them, but the impact it’s having on the environment.”
A report commissioned by the company, State of Sustainability, looked at the digital ad industries in five countries, including Australia, and determined they created 2.6 million metric tons of emissions each year. Making a difference proved to be relatively easy.
“Working with publishers and looking at their advertising supply chain, we can make some simple and pretty painless changes. In some cases, reduce their carbon footprint by 80% within 24 hours.”
A study by the Association of National Advertisers found 15% of media budgets are invested in ineffective and low-value made-for-advertising websites.
“They’re not real sites and they have lots of ads,” Cheung said. “They game the system to make that content viewable, but when you look at it as a human it’s those junky ‘stories’ online that are clearly written by AI and don’t make sense.
“It’s low-value inventory and it tends to have the highest carbon emissions. Somehow this low-value stuff has snuck onto a media plan.”
Getting rid of it not only saves money and redirects budgets to more effective places, but it can dramatically reduced emissions. Scope3 then invested in making the process of removing that dirty and junky inventory much simpler.
“We launched an automated way of allowing brands, marketers and agencies to exclude that bottom 15%, called Climate Shield. It’s within the demand side platforms. You can push a button and get rid of that low value and high carbon inventory.”
It’s safe to bet the majority of those who profit from the 15% spend aren’t thrilled about the offering and its popularity.
But as Cheung pointed out, most are “bad actors” who operate in the shadows, so there haven’t been any complaints. For legitimate operators with a high carbon output, there are opportunities to make simple tweaks that have a big impact.
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