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According to recent estimates, the Cloud now has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry. What can marketers do to reduce online advertising’s damaging outputs? Brian O’Kelley, co-founder and CEO of Scope3, joined Adweek’s NexTech Summit to share his insight on simple ways marketers can work to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.
Shrinking the industry’s carbon footprint
According to O’Kelley’s recent analysis, every impression that’s served programmatically generates one gram of carbon dioxide.
“That’s insane. That means that a million impressions would generate one metric ton of carbon—that’s the same as a flight to London [from New York]. I kept running the numbers again and again, trying to convince myself that I was wrong,” O’Kelley said.
O’Kelley’s analysis spurred him to start a company to decarbonize ad tech, and Scope3 was born.
“We’ve seen a dramatic shift in the United States to make climate change, if not the most important issue for the industry, one of the most important issues for the industry.”
O’Kelley said that some of programmatic advertising’s climate problems can be solved by placing priority on quality content and not made-for-advertising websites.
Ebiquity recently partnered with Scope3 to find the carbon footprint of 116 billion impressions from 43 major brand advertisers. They found that made-for-advertising websites generated 26% more carbon emissions than standard websites and that 15.3% of media spend was wasted on made-for-advertising inventory in the United States.
“If you think about where the carbon comes from, it comes from all of this programmatic reselling—putting way too much junk on your pages,” O’Kelley explained. “If you have crappy content, you’re going to do everything possible to try to layer as much technology as you can to drive revenue. If you’re a quality publisher, you don’t need as much. So, if we were to cut the carbon footprint of programmatic, you’d actually be shifting spend back to quality publishers. You’re connecting buyers and sellers more closely in the supply chain.”
While O’Kelley said fixing programmatic advertising is undoubtedly necessary to help save the planet, its benefits stretch beyond that.
“It’s not just about the environment. It’s also about making your advertising more effective. As an industry, we can fix programmatic to make it greener and better—more efficient for everybody in the ecosystem.”
‘We can fix this’
In November, Scope3 challenged a publisher to reduce its carbon footprint by 50%. Within 24 hours, it removed 47% of resellers from its ads.txt file, which reduced its carbon footprint by 80%. O’Kelley said this will save 75,600 kg of carbon dioxide per month. He encourages all publishers to do their part to create a sustainable industry.
“This is something you can do now,” he said. “Publishers can change their setup in minutes. This isn’t going to take years. It’s not going to take green hydrogen pipelines. There’s no real-world tech required to fix programmatic. We can just make a change and do it.”
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