Last year, a MAGNA study found a link between “sustainable advertising practices and positive attention metrics,” with an ad in view for more than 10 seconds producing 64% less carbon emissions than a five-second ad.
Recently, the Association of National Advertisers — in collaboration with Scope3, whose data model was also used in that MAGNA study — released its Sustainability in Media Planning study, which found that brands could reduce their carbon footprints by one-third by incorporating certain sustainability measures.
The study focused on the digital media campaigns of six larger brands, including Coca-Cola, GM, and Kroger, and the data centers whose high energy output is the main cause for emissions. Ultimately, between 50 and 1,500 grams of carbon are emitted for every 1,000 ad impressions, with 50% of those emissions driven by just 2% of the sites that programmatic campaigns targeted.
As Marketing Dive explains, the study found that brands could “have an immediate impact by simply targeting away from high-emission media pages, such as so-called media for advertising sites (MFAs).”
“What we found through this is that significant carbon emissions reduction is possible even in the early stages of practicing more sustainable advertising and advertisers do not have to sacrifice their performance goals or increase ad costs to make meaningful emissions improvements,” says Jason Turbowitz, who oversaw ANA’s Media and Measurement Leadership Council.
Brands in the study were able to reduce their carbon costs by as much as 36% by taking such actions as:
- adopting green private marketplaces that are autoset for low-emissions inventory
- targeting that inventory through updated inclusion lists
- eliminating “bad actors” and MFAs by optimizing exclusion lists
“It is not easy reducing carbon emissions,” says MediaPost’s Ray Schultz. “And many firms might choose not to attempt it because their customers are not interested in these values. But the study argues that sustainability in advertising ‘is an issue that affects all of us,’ and that it does not harm ad performance.”
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