As the climate crisis accelerates, the spotlight has shifted from traditional industries known for their heavy carbon emissions to unexpected culprits – one of which is digital advertising. Marketers are now realizing the carbon footprint of programmatic advertising is larger than they thought and are looking to decrease the carbon impact of their programmatic buys. In the advertising industry, a common response to this challenge often involves adding more vendors to the buying process. Vendors offer a variety of solutions to help mitigate carbon footprints, each claiming to address sustainability in different ways. Some vendors promise to hand-select programmatic partners based on their sustainability credentials. Others aim to optimize ad placements to reduce wasted impressions, and some even offer environmental incentives like tree planting or wildlife conservation for every ad dollar spent. However, this approach can complicate rather than simplify efforts to achieve sustainability.
Optimizing Your Supply Path
A more straightforward and effective way to reduce carbon emissions lies in streamlining your supply path. By focusing on fewer, higher-quality ads from reputable publishers, you can significantly decrease your environmental impact. As highlighted in GroupM’s sustainability best practices note, this approach not only minimizes complexity, but also enhances the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.
The rationale behind this is simple: The fewer technology partners involved in the ad buy, the fewer servers are involved, and therefore the smaller the carbon impact. Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) often account for a significant portion of the emissions tied to programmatic advertising, so cutting down on these intermediaries is an easy starting point towards reducing your carbon footprint.
The second key step is to focus on quality, reputable sites. According to Scope3, low-quality sites with excessive ad loads such as Made For Advertising (MFAs) sites – produce 26% more emissions than their premium counterparts. By being more selective about choosing your publisher partners, you can quickly decrease their environmental impact.
So how can you put these approaches into practice? First, you should begin by looking over your supply path and evaluating where you can eliminate waste. The shortest supply path will always be to buy direct from the publisher whenever possible. Particularly for highly involved, content-rich partnerships, direct relationships with publishers are both the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly route for clients.
However, there can be an issue here around scale. Few publishers are able to truly offer global reach at a significant scale. So where do you go from there?
In those situations, working with a partner like Dianomi enables advertisers to reach quality publishers at scale, without significantly extending the supply path. Revenue goes direct to the publisher, ensuring they are fairly compensated and more of your money goes directly towards buying ads. And, thanks to a CPC trading basis, Dianomi ensures 100% visibility for the ads that you pay for, significantly reducing wastage. Both financial and environmental.