- Brands can reduce their carbon footprints by as much as a 3rd by incorporating sustainability into their media planning, according to a recent report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
- The ANA’s latest study, “Sustainability in Media Planning,” evaluated several top brands’ digital media campaigns and located that three key approaches — adopting green private marketplaces, inclusion lists and exclusion lists — were best at cutting emissions and led to a positive impact on overall growth.
- The study also found that 2% of media sites accounted for 50% of total emissions, meaning brands can have an instantaneous impact by simply targeting away from high-emission media pages, similar to so-called media for advertising sites (MFAs).
The facts are clear: the advertising industry is a significant contributor to the warming of the planet. Every 1,000 ad impressions emit between 50 to 1,500-plus grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere due to the high energy output from data centers, per the study. In addition, every minute of social video consumption emits about 2.6 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, and the typical American watches roughly an hour of social video every single day.
By taking some easy actions within the media planning stages of their campaigns, advertisers can significantly reduce their carbon footprint. The study also found that making such changes positively contributed to an organization’s growth.
“What we found through that is that significant carbon emissions reduction is feasible even within the early stages of practicing more sustainable advertising and advertisers do not need to sacrifice their performance goals or increase ad costs to make meaningful emissions improvements,” said Jason Turbowitz, senior vp and Media and Measurement Leadership Initiative lead, who oversees ANA’s Media and Measurement Leadership Council, in an announcement.
The study evaluated data from brands including Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kimberly Clark, Kroger, Mars and Mondelez. The findings showed that straightforward actions like eliminating placement on low-quality content, reducing waste in the availability chain and opting not to pay for an ad that nobody sees not only reduced carbon emissions, but enabled advertisers to redistribute their spending on high-quality sites, hit their KPIs earlier and avoid overextending their budgets on bad inventory.
The report found that three actions were best at reducing emissions and improving campaign efficiency. In order of effectiveness, they were:
- Adopting green media products or private marketplaces that routinely select for low-emissions inventory.
- Updating inclusion lists to goal only lower emission-emitting inventory, and thus eliminating bad actors similar to MFAs.
- Optimizing exclusion lists to eliminate any bad actors.
By taking those actions, brands within the study were able to reduce their carbon costs between 3% and 36%. The most reductions were realized by firms that adopted green media products and/or updated inclusion lists. Those that simply updated their exclusion lists only had carbon-cost reductions in the one digits.
Based on those results, the study had 4 steps media buyers could take to reduce their carbon costs while improving their advertising performance:
- Adopt tools to measure emissions, which can help discover high-emission, low-performance inventory that can be cut from campaigns.
- Choose an activity-based measurement model (reasonably than a spend-based measurement model) that points to campaign activities which might be causing disproportionate emissions.
- Adopt automated green solutions, similar to green media products, inclusion lists and exclusion lists.
- Eliminate MFA inventory, which tends to drive high emissions without improving business outcomes.
The ANA’s Media & Measurement Leadership Council conducted its Sustainability in Media Planning study in collaboration with Scope3.
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