More sustainable advertising will be a necessity from 2024. This is not only a demand from consumers, but also from new European guidelines. But how big is the CO2 footprint of digital advertising and how can you reduce it? I will give you the 6 most important tips and insights!
Why sustainable advertising?
From 2024, the new European directive, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), companies to report on their sustainability efforts. Digital advertising contributes significantly to global carbon emissions. For example, an average online advertising campaign emits 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to driving a vehicle a distance of more than 20,000 kmTo understand what we can do, it is important to understand where exactly the emissions come from.
De CO2-footprint: programmatic-inkoop vs. walled gardens
So let’s start with some purchasing basics. The advertising market falls roughly into 2 categories: ‘walled gardens’ (closed systems such as Meta, TikTok, Reddit and Google Search) and the open market. In the walled gardens, such as Meta, you buy ads through their own advertising tool and you usually only show them within their platform.
The open market, also known as programmatic purchasing, works according to a complex auction system where demand (advertisers) and supply (publishers) are constantly brought together. For example, we as advertisers place a banner online for a certain bid. At that moment, all available banner places are retrieved from websites on the internet and your advertisement is ultimately shown in only one of these many places.
The walled gardens and programmatic purchasing emit CO2 in different ways. With walled gardens, the CO2 emissions of your advertisement are included in the total emissions of the data centers of, for example, Meta. Since Meta does not provide insight into this, you as an advertiser have little insight into the CO2 emissions of this advertisement. This makes it difficult to achieve sustainable profit here.
The biggest sustainable profit in advertising can be achieved outside the walled gardens, with programmatic purchasing. The process of constantly retrieving all available spots consumes a lot of energy. You can deal with this more intelligently yourself.
How do you advertise sustainably?
1. Measure, reduce and offset your CO2 emissions
Sustainable advertising starts with understanding the impact of digital advertising on carbon emissions. Use tools like Scope3, Good-Loop in AdGreen to gain insight into your CO2 emissions. You can test with different media strategies to measure the difference. Measuring = knowing! If you know what you emit, you can compensate for it.
2. Optimize the bidding process
Limit the number of purchasing and sales systems within programmatic advertising. For example, make direct deals with publishers. This way you avoid unnecessary data being retrieved from other sites in the bidding process, where your advertisement is ultimately not shown.
3. Choose quality over quantity
Don’t just focus on generating a lot of impressions with a high frequency, but especially on the quality of your impressions. Each ad impression is a separate auction, where all available spots on many websites are collected each time. Each impression emits CO2. So striving for as many impressions as possible increases CO2 emissions.
By choosing a strategy where the quality of the impressions is higher, the frequency of your campaign can be lowered. This is more sustainable and effective. The value of impressions varies by channel and medium. A good example is video.
Video
When you buy instream and focus on completed views, the interaction time with your brand is quickly more than 10 seconds. With display advertising, on the other hand, a much higher frequency is needed to achieve the same impact on brand awareness. So choose impactful means and reduce the need for repeated impressions. This way you advertise effectively and sustainably.
4. Choose other advertising channels
You can reduce the CO2 impact of your campaigns by making smart channel choices. For example, with native advertising in podcasts, you integrate the advertisement into a podcast episode, instead of placing it separately. This does not lead to additional CO2 emissions. After all, the podcast episode goes online anyway. With or without your advertisement. A native advertisement in a podcast also ties in with point 3.
Because your ad is naturally integrated into the podcast, many people listen to it in its entirety. This way, you get more than a minute of full attention relatively cheaply. The longer the interaction, the greater the impact, the lower the frequency and therefore the number of impressions. And yes, this is how we advertise more sustainably.
5. Opt for less heavy creations and reuse existing resources
By cleverly reusing existing resources, you need to produce new ones less often. And use less heavy and large files. In this way, you reduce the energy required to retrieve the files.
6. Invest in generating first-party data
By collecting data directly from users, you build your own database. The more data you have, the less you have to depend on online advertising with complex auction systems. This not only ensures that you save CO2, but also helps you save money and communicate more relevantly with your target group. A win-win, so to speak!
Time to prepare
In short, it is time to prepare yourself as a company for the sustainability legislation. Measure your carbon footprint and reduce it by making conscious choices in the campaign purchasing process. Experiment with different channels and measure the impact of your advertising strategies to make well-considered choices and advertise more sustainably.
Source: www.frankwatching.com
