Dive Brief:

• Brands can reduce their carbon footprints by as much as a third by incorporating sustainability into their media planning, according to a recent report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).  
• The ANA’s new study, “Sustainability in Media Planning,” evaluated several top brands’ digital media campaigns and found that three key approaches — adopting green private marketplaces, inclusion lists and exclusion lists — were most effective 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 immediate impact by simply targeting away from high-emission media pages, such as so-called media for advertising sites (MFAs).  

Dive Insight:

The facts are clear: the advertising industry is a major 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 average American watches approximately an hour of social video every day.  

By taking some simple actions in 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 a company’s growth.  

“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,” said Jason Turbowitz, senior vice president and Media and Measurement Leadership Initiative lead, who oversees ANA’s Media and Measurement Leadership Council, in a statement.

The study evaluated data from brands including Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kimberly Clark, Kroger, Mars and Mondelez. The findings showed that simple actions like eliminating placement on low-quality content, reducing waste in the supply chain and opting not to pay for an ad that no one 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 most effective at reducing emissions and improving campaign efficiency. In order of effectiveness, they were: 

• Adopting green media products or private marketplaces that automatically select for low-emissions inventory.  
• Updating inclusion lists to target only lower emission-emitting inventory, and thus eliminating bad actors such as MFAs.
• Optimizing exclusion lists to eliminate any bad actors. 

By taking those actions, brands in the study were able to reduce their carbon costs between 3% and 36%. The most reductions were realized by companies that adopted green media products and/or updated inclusion lists. Those that simply updated their exclusion lists only had carbon-cost reductions in the single digits.  

Based on those results, the study had four steps media buyers could take to reduce their carbon costs while improving their advertising performance:

• Adopt tools to measure emissions, which can help identify high-emission, low-performance inventory that can be cut from campaigns.
• Choose an activity-based measurement model (rather than a spend-based measurement model) that points to campaign activities that are causing disproportionate emissions.  
• Adopt automated green solutions, such as 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.