Our Chief Technology Officer Yuri Staraselski recently sat down with MarTech journalist Constantine von Hoffman to discuss a topic that’s on every marketer’s wish list: How to reduce your carbon footprint, save money, and also improve the impact and performance of your advertising campaigns. As a champion of marketing efficiency, Yuri explained how we can use the power of programmatic targeting to reduce wastage and therefore, also reduce overall carbon emissions alongside ad spend.
Here are some of Yuri’s suggestions on how to get started with more sustainable ad campaigns:
As an industry, we need to do more
Research shows that around 4% of all carbon emissions are attributable to digital advertising campaigns. Just one digital ad campaign delivering 1 million impressions has the same carbon footprint as a round-trip flight from Boston to London.
The true cost of delivering an ad campaign
We all know video is considered the most engaging content out there, but it’s also the worst offender in terms of climate change. Delivering a pre-roll video ad generates about 50 times more CO2 compared to a standard banner ad, due to the larger file sizes required.
Efficient targeting = less wastage
It’s well known that a lot of adverts are never viewed. So we are sending all these files around, with no one really looking at them, and they are generating unnecessary emissions. In other words, “bad” digital ad spending harms the environment.
But, if we start thinking about optimising towards metrics like attention time and viewability this means that there is a lot less wastage. By optimising towards the audience that are actually engaging with your ads (and not wasting your budget on those who are not interested), you can reduce your overall CO2 output.
Smarter ad formats
There has been research showing that you can reduce video quality in ads without impacting brand awareness or campaign effectiveness. With just a slight reduction in quality, you can reduce emissions by a massive 20% to 30%.
A global effort
The pressure is on everyone in the advertising industry to start taking action now. So, quite rightly, brands and clients are asking partners like Crimtan about the steps we are taking and about the things that they can do to become more efficient. It truly is a global effort.
We recently released a guide to sustainable advertising if you want to find out more about what you can do to limit your advertising carbon footprint (while maximising marketing performance) and you can read Yuri’s whole interview with Martech here.
Thank you to Martech for highlighting the important conversation of the impact of advertising on climate change. We’re passionate about this topic and if you’d like to speak to us about how you can start making a difference in your advertising approach, please get in touch.