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White paper: Reducing the Carbon Impact of Digital Advertising

7.9.23

By Audrey Danthony

3 min

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According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the last 8 years have been the hottest on record. The signs are clear: global warming is well and truly here.

Since the 1980s, each decade has seen global temperatures higher than the last due to record levels of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Human activity, including the exponential increase in the use of devices and digital services, is a major contributing factor to this global warming.

Despite the illusion that digital technologies are ‘clean’, their environmental impact is massive, and consumers are waking up to this fact.

Take digital advertising as a case in point: since the early 2000s the space has experienced quasi-exponential growth. Having risen from $10B to $378B in the last 20 years, according to eMarketer, it’s now the largest advertising medium in terms of investment globally.

The ever-increasing growth of the digital advertising industry has had a clear and measurable impact on climate change.

Discover the Solution to Ad Sustainability

At Impact Plus we believe digital advertising can be more sustainable.

Our award-winning sustaintech solution enables digital advertising players (brands, agencies, publishers, adtech and adnetworks) to evaluate and reduce their environmental impact without sacrificing performance.

So, are you ready to make a positive impact on the environment while ensuring your digital advertising practices remain effective and sustainable?

We are excited to present five key takeaways from our latest Impact Plus white paper, which sheds light on the carbon footprint of the advertising industry and provides actionable solutions to reduce it.

Watch the below video where Impact Plus' CMO James Jones talked through the main levers to reducing the carbon impact of digital advertising, at DMEXCO 2023.

Impact Plus CMO, James Jones, speaks at DMEXCO 2023

5 key takeaways from the white paper

You can also read through the those levers in more detail below:

  1. The importance of adopting environmental performance indicators. Our white paper discusses the need for the industry to adopt a consistent measurement approach centered around two types of indicators:
    - The total volume of carbon emissions — making it possible to manage the reduction in absolute value over time.
    - A unit value — making it possible to compare campaigns, activations, actors or contexts with each other, independent of the volume of advertising.
  2. The need to eco-design your creatives and your site. The white paper discusses the fact that, in the case of digital advertising, the work of the creative teams who produce the graphic elements and the click-through website is key.
  3. The importance of thinking about your ad-tech stack. The more technology involved in ad serving, the more resources used and the more carbon emitted. Our white paper discusses considerations around building media plans and the need to limit waste when buying or selling programmatically.
  4. Focus on reducing energy loss due to advertising waste. An ad that does not reach its target creates a dead energy loss and therefore unnecessary carbon emissions. The white paper details how to raise the quality standards of advertising distribution by optimising the viewability of advertisements and thus lower the rate of energy-sapping, wasted impressions.
  5. How to measure the impact of your action against the counterproductive effects. Our white paper details how an effective action in one context is not necessarily effective in another. The same action can have a positive or negative impact depending on the nature and parameters of the campaign, and this is an important consideration when it comes to driving sustainability in digital advertising.

Don’t miss out on these invaluable insights—download the in-depth white paper by filling out the form located in the footer at the bottom of this webpage.