On average, every digital advertising campaign emits around 5.4 tons of CO2, approximately equal to the emissions of a petrol or diesel car running for a year. Many initiatives have taken place to reduce carbon emissions from digital advertising campaigns.
In this post, I have shared some notable data to understand the importance of carbon footprint in digital advertising. Please read this post fully and take action to reduce the carbon emissions from your digital ad campaigns.
What is Carbon Footprint?
It is the amount of carbon emitted into the environment due to an action by an individual, organization, product, or event.
For example, Carbon emissions by the petrol car, carbon emissions by an industry
What is the carbon footprint in digital advertising?
It is the amount of carbon emitted into the environment for running digital advertising campaigns.
Including me, many people do not even think about the carbon emissions of digital advertising. We strongly believe that vehicles, the aviation sector, industries, and natural disasters are the main sources of higher carbon emissions.
This is not completely true.
As per the data available on emeritus.org, the aviation sector’s contribution to climate change is roughly 3.5%, whereas the internet and digital technologies contribution is about 4%. If we start using the AI tools in the full phase, this percentage will increase to 8%.
As per the data available on statista.com, on average, every digital advertising campaign generates 5.4 tons of CO2, whereas one person generates 4 tons of CO2 per year.
How did carbon emissions happen in digital advertising?
As you already know, many parties play together to show digital ads to their audiences. Many companies are available to provide these services to businesses to reach their audiences.
Below, power-consuming technologies should be needed to deliver the digital ads.
Servers and Data Center: Ads, Campaign Details, and Audience Data are stored and retrieved from here. Many data centers are still using fossil fuels to generate power.
Programmatic Ad Transactions: Many ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, and supply-side platforms participated in the real-time bidding auction. Each auction handles a huge number of requests, which consumes more power.
Data Providers, Tracking, and Analytics: In digital advertising, third-party data providers share valuable audience data with the ad platforms. They have a continuous connection with the platforms. Similarly, tracking and analytics platforms also have a continuous connection with the platforms and websites to provide valuable insights and reports. They consume a huge amount of power to run.
The above are just an example of understanding the carbon footprint contributors of digital advertising.
As per the data shared by martech consultancy, campaigns with social, video, display and search ads approximately produce 323 tons of carbon dioxide. Creative designing, content views, auction process, data storage are the key sources.
Why does measuring and reducing carbon footprints matter?
Every nation and every industry started to work on carbon emission reduction. Carbon emission reduction is very important for controlling climate change. As a part of it, digital advertising industry also took some initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint.
Ad Net Zero and IAB Europe’s Sustainability Standards Committee are the two key initiatives to control the carbon footprint in digital advertising.
You can checkout the 5 action plans of Ad Net Zero in their website [https://adnetzero.com/]
The first step for reducing the carbon footprint is to analyze and understand the level of emissions your organization is currently responsible for. Then only you can make a plan and work towards reducing the carbon footprint.
How do you measure the carbon footprint in digital advertising?
You cannot directly measure the carbon emissions from your ad campaign. You should use third-party providers help to measure it. Many demand-side platforms have partnered with those data providers to provide carbon footprint reduction solutions.
Sharethrough’s Carbon Emissions Estimator tool helps to get approximate carbon emissions by providing impressions, creative type, location, and some more details.
Scope3 : Scope3 has partnered with many demand-side platforms to provide comprehensive data on carbon emissions to the advertisers. By using the Scope3 service, you can get the detailed carbon emission report for each of your campaigns.
Based on the report, you can manually/automatically exclude the high carbon emission websites and apps.
Integral Ad Science : IAS also offers end-to-end carbon emission tracking capability for digital ad campaigns. Using its data, marketers can understand about the carbon footprint of their campaigns.
Reference Articles :
https://emeritus.org/blog/carbon-footprint-of-digital-advertising
https://resources.eyeo.com/how-sustainable-digital-advertising-today
Conclusion
As digital advertising continues to grow, it impacts the environment by carbon footprint. The carbon footprint of online ads comes from data centers, real-time bidding processes, data transmission, and tracking mechanisms. Measuring and reducing these emissions is crucial for creating a more sustainable advertising ecosystem.
Companies like Scope3, Sharethrough, Integral Ad Science, AdGreen, and Hiili offer innovative tools to track and minimize the carbon footprint of ad campaigns. By adopting green supply path initiatives, optimizing ad delivery, and using carbon tracking technologies, advertisers can significantly cut emissions while maintaining effective marketing strategies.
