Digital Advertising is Going Green (er)

The murky waters of digital advertising are getting a little greener

We can thank Greta Thunberg for pushing the conversation on the issue of climate change a few years ago when the world seemingly forgot. We have made efforts in the marketing world to adopt sustainable practices, like going paperless, but digital marketing has a bigger impact on climate change and sustainability than you realize, particularly in terms of carbon emissions. In fact, according to BidTellect, one million ad impressions produce the same amount of carbon emissions per passenger as a round-trip flight from Boston to London.

Surprised by that statement?

To be honest, so were we when we first heard it. So, we set out to learn more. Here we’ll share our learnings of the not-so-green reality of digital advertising.

Understanding carbon emissions
It’s important that we all understand what carbon emissions are and how they contribute to global warming. Here are some quick facts courtesy of National Geographic.

• Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is found naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere - CO₂ is a trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere. It is also found in large quantities dissolvedin the world’s oceans. CO₂ is a byproduct of cellular respiration and is an essential component of photosynthesis—plants, algae, and certain types of bacteria remove it from the air in the process of carbon fixation.
• CO₂ is a byproduct of human activities - Burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—is the number one source of global CO₂emissions.
• The amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased steadily due to human activity - Scientists believe the concentrationof CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere remained relatively stable for thousands of years at roughly 280 parts per million (ppm). However, since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, human activity has significantly increased the atmospheric concentration.

Digital advertising is a deceptively carbon-intensive space that contributes to the increased amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Researcher Mike Haza found that the digital ecosystem actually accounts for 4% of global carbon emissions from data transmission, data centers and device usage. All of this activity requires a significant amount of energy and generates carbon emissions. Here are a few ways we as marketers can reduce our carbon footprint.

Right people, right time, right place
With so many different ways to reach consumers, it’s become even more important to find efficiencies – making sure that we reach the right people, at the right time, in the right digital space while making ad optimizations to most effectively spend client media dollars and garner positive results. By measuring those results, we can determine what tactics helped reach campaign goals and optimize based on those insights. We can also take that goal of efficiency and generating positive results and apply it to sustainability in digital marketing; precision reduces the number of irrelevant ads, which reduces carbon emissions.

Reduce the energy impact of the equipment
Similar to optimizing campaigns by shifting focus to a tactic or audience to accomplish campaign goals, we can optimize and shift ads to sites and platforms that produce less carbon emissions than others.

Start by taking a look at your own assets like your website and CRM platforms. You can reduce your digital footprint by removing any content that is no longer relevant or providing value to avoid cluttering the cloud. Next, look for any large images that you can reduce in size. This requires users to download fewer bytes, which means fewer carbon emissions. As a bonus, it will improve page load speed, which impacts SEO. For your CRM, clean up your contact database. Duplicate contacts, outdated records and inactive customers require more storage space, leading to higher energy consumption and more carbon emissions.

Interested in the carbon footprint of sites you frequent? Some sites have their carbon footprint/emissions readily available to the public, typically found within the “About” or “Values” page. Those that don’t can be tracked using outside sources.

Here are a few free resources that don’t require any personal information to use:

• https://withcabin.com/inspect
• https://ecograder.com/
• https://www.websitecarbon.com/
• https://digitalbeacon.co/

There are several brand safety implementations already being used in the ad world, so why not add one more to the mix and do our part in keeping planet Earth alive by not serving ads on sites with high carbon emissions?

Work with green media partners
Not sure if tracking carbon emissions is in your media partner’s capabilities? Here are some questions to ask your media partners to get a foundation of knowledge:

• Are you able to track carbon emissions or green scores across websites?
• What partnerships to reduce carbon emission do you have currently in place?
• Have you seen any connections between low carbon emitting sites and higher engagement or CPMs?

Now that you’re aware of what carbon emissions are, how they impact the environment, and just how much is produced as a result of digital advertising, you be that green change. Sometimes it really is as easy as swapping out plastic water bottles for a stainless-steel cup or decluttering your saved files!

Interested in learning more about sustainability and marketing? Check out our blog post about marketing sustainable related products here.

We’re here to help you meet your marketing and business goals. Let us know how we can help you by dropping us a note.