Media Buying Briefing: Sustainability once again takes center stage across digital media

By Michael Bürgi

Late last week, a coalition of governmental organizations, academics and private sector companies banded together at an environmental conference to form the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES), to engender a “green revolution,” as its announcement blared.

To paraphrase from the movie Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — looks like sustainability’s back on the menu, boys!

In this iteration of the “green conversation,” the focus seems to center around digital processes that consume excessive amounts of energy or lead to excessive emissions. The entire digital landscape is under scrutiny, even though executives reached for this story agreed marketers aren’t yet penalizing energy hogs.

“Today I’m not hearing pressure from clients yet to reduce emissions of their campaigns,” said Ed McElvain, executive vp of Mediahub’s P3 unit, which handles data-driven and digital platforms buying. “I would like that to be something that… we can take to them and work with them on establishing that as a goal.”

Brian O’Kelley, CEO and founder of Scope3, an ad-tech firm focused on sustainable practices, noted that other media markets across the globe have been focusing more intently on sustainability compared to the U.S., notably Australia and western Europe.

To help with that, Digiday has learned that Scope3 and ad exchange Sharethrough will announce tomorrow they are partnering with launch Green PMPs (private marketplaces), which lets brands offset emissions that comprise up to 95 percent of a company’s carbon impact caused by ad impressions. It will also help to decarbonize the programmatic advertising supply chain, which is seen as one of the worst offenders, as it often requires dozens of humming servers to process a single ad buy.

“What started with brands growing their sustainable marketing initiatives has grown into a broader understanding of the environmental impact of the advertising supply chain,” said Luc Marsolais, chief operations officer at Sharethrough. “Particularly with more and more brands and agencies committing to be carbon neutral, such commitments aren’t possible without the ad tech industry building solutions to offset the carbon produced from the energy required to deliver ads.”

“In the programmatic landscape, we always want to have the most direct path to supply as possible,” said McElvain. “That’s just good for cost efficiency, regardless of emissions. As the world is moving more towards first-party data, and setting up private marketplace deals, I think we will naturally sort of start gravitating towards more direct engagement, and less links in that in that programmatic chain. Doing that will also have the benefit of reducing emissions.”

O’Kelley credited all the holding companies for taking the issue seriously and cited WPP and GroupM in particular for moving last year to reach zero emissions across its own network as well as the entire supply chain it works with by 2030.

“They set the standard for the market, and that is causing a seismic shift throughout the market,” said O’Kelley. “That means every every publisher, every media owner, has to have a net-zero strategy. They don’t — most companies haven’t started taking this seriously yet.”

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Source:: Digiday