Building a more sustainable content ecosystem
How marketers can build for sustainability across their content lifecycle.
Written by
Isobel Bruce
April 22, 2024
3
min read
The advertising industry has a growing, environment-shaped question mark hanging over it.
Despite industry-wide commitments to improve the outsized environmental impact of advertising, the International Energy Agency estimates that 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions are related to advertising and marketing operations.
Improving the carbon footprint of the industry will only be possible through a collective reexamination of how it currently operates. One of the key blockers to this process is the continued lack of visibility into the end-to-end lifecycle of an ad – from production to activation across different channels.
Examining the key stages of an ad’s lifecycle reveals opportunities to cut back on emissions and improve the efficiency of the energy being invested into advertising.
Producing ads is an energy-intensive process. Flying to shoot locations, powering all the equipment, bringing in teams from around the world: all this just to create the final perfect 30 seconds of footage. Research from fifty five in 2022 into the end-to-end carbon footprint for a fictional campaign found that campaign production contributed to 35 tons of carbon emissions. That’s almost eight times the amount of emissions produced by a car every year, for just one campaign.
After the heavy carbon investment in producing the core assets for a campaign, analysis from CreativeX found that under 50% of these assets were activated and exposed to their intended audience. Rendering the investment into their production useless, an unnecessary financial and environmental cost.
AI can help the advertising industry tackle this waste of money, energy, and opportunity by automatically isolating content that’s paid for but not used. Instead of producing even more content, advertisers can now look to activate pre-existing work that hasn’t been seen by consumers. Making the most of these unseen assets allows them to build a more efficient, and environmentally-friendly, creative production process.
Isolating content that doesn’t get used is an important part of improving efficiency. But the carbon footprint of an ad doesn’t stop at production. A large portion of emissions connected to advertising are tied to the energy requirements of data housing and the connectivity infrastructure advertisers have come to rely on.
In 2016 an environmental impact assessment review of online advertising estimated that it accounted for 10% of the internet’s total infrastructure emissions. That was almost 10 years ago. Since then the media landscape has become even more complicated to contain and measure.
In 2022 Good-Loop estimated that the average online ad campaign contributes around 5.4 tonnes of CO2 a year. This is equivalent to almost half of what the average individual in the UK creates annually.
Ryan Cochrane, COO of Goodloop, underscored how the rise of programmatic advertising has exacerbated advertising’s environmental impact. With ad spaces now automatically bought and sold to advertisers 24/7, the industry needs to factor in the emissions of “trillions of auctions that take place every day without any ads being served at all.”
There are ways to make these new investments more energy efficient. Scope3 worked with the Trade Desk to eliminate nearly 5,400 tons of carbon a year by shutting off Google’s Open Bidding ad auction platform. If every ad company stopped buying ads using Open Bidding it would save 100,000 metric tons of carbon a year, equivalent to taking 20,000 cars off the road.
Another route towards reducing emissions is to use attention data to target advertising towards low clutter, high attention advertising sites. Besides shrinking their carbon footprint, advertisers targeting these placements could also seebetter results for consumer experience, brand sales, and energy consumption.
Consumers are becoming, on the whole, more environmentally conscious, but advertisers have not yet caught up. Research from CreativeX in 2023 found that just 4% of ads contain sustainability messaging, despite consumers’ demands for sustainability rising.
But advertisers need to focus on how they’re producing and activating ads, not just the messages they contain, if they want to reduce adland’s environmental impact.
Ironically, though driving towards sustainability is often seen as incompatible with wider business objectives, creating efficiencies in content production and activation will reduce costs and improve performance. CreativeX estimated that the average advertiser is wasting at least $25 million annually on producing content that never gets used.
Advertisers need to move beyond paying lip service to sustainability, and incorporate environmental objectives into their BAU. By doing so, they are set to drive efficiencies across the board – from money invested to energy consumed.
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