Sustainability - A brighter future for modern marketing?

Sustainability has been one of the big topics in ad land this year, Indeed somewhat ironically) it was the talk of the town at Cannes. This is a space that if I am being honest I was initially cynical about - not because it's not important - but instead due to a combination of naivete into how much energy, and therefore carbon, digital advertising was producing. Mostly, however, because I have seen in the past how good-intentioned initiatives have been seized by opportunists for a quick buck (to that end, fraud and viewability are arguably in worse spots now online than when solutions first went mainstream over a decade ago). Yet after much research in the last months (and meeting some great companies and inspirational people like Good-Loop’s Amy Williams) I have come to realise the importance and believe that this time we can (and must) do better. According to Good-Loop's carbon calculator, a typical online ad campaign emits 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide -- almost half of what an average person in the UK produces in a year. This stat actually brings me to my first point, that whilst such claims can be debated they are a great starting point. More importantly directionally there is no doubt that advertising is using carbon and that directionally we can make a difference. Let’s not let precision be the enemy of action.

What follows in this article is my attempt to lay down how I hope it can go better this time than before. Note, I am not claiming to be an expert in this space (speak to specialists like Amy and her team for that - something I encourage all of you to do). However I would hope my experiences at the sharp end of digital marketing can help marketers take these new products and apply them in a way that drives the biggest impact. 

First the basics. Digital Marketing causes energy to be used and so, carbon to be released. It is this carbon creation we are using to talk about enviromental sustainability at least in this article (others may go deeper). Digital marketing causes carbon to be created in three major ways. The first is in the act of serving creatively where for each kb of ad served more energy is deployed. The second is through the supply path, for each ad served many bid requests and back-end functions have to happen, all costing energy/carbon. The third is through the base carbon footprint of the publisher, eg for a newspaper, how much carbon is needed to produce their product - probably the hardest to measure. For measuring these things Scope3 founded by Brian O’Kelly has become the early standard for getting data together and another firm I encourage you all to engage with. 

It’s worth saying here again that this is still an emerging space. The science of measuring the impact will develop and we also need to look at if and when actors are using renewable energy sources to power their systems. Those that can demonstrate this should be rewarded, no doubt. Yet to me the data available is sufficiently strong to be actionable and actually can improve not only carbon sustainability but other challenges too as we shall see.

Fixing Perverse Incentives. Before we look at how we reduce energy and Carbon let’s look at why previous efforts to solve for fraud, unethical content, viewability, illegal activity and more have failed. In my view this comes down to perverse incentives. Perverse incentives being a core concept we need to understand in this space. For almost all of these areas the technology and practice exists to make dramatic cuts into these areas, yet many actors in the supply chain do not put enough effort into fixing them. Consider a publisher or a supply platform, they know they have fraud (and a mixture of other problems too) on their inventory portfolio and could clean it up, yet doing so would actively lower their monthly revenues short term. Worse is that advertisers’ attribution is so poor in many cases that if they did improve inventory quality it would likely not improve performance significantly leading to higher future revenues. This is particularly true of long tail publishers who do not need to worry about any reputational damage. What we then have is a “tragedy of the commons” situation where networks of inventory (be they publishers or platforms) in many cases dilute the pool of inventory with troublesome quality. What makes this dynamic worse is that the opacity of the programmatic supply path (see how hard PWC found it to audit) means that bad actors are not punished for muddying the waters and so we have a race to the bottom. It is this cycle of perverse incentives we need to break. 

A Framework for Marketers. 

With these basics understood, the following is the framework I hope advertisers will take to reduce their carbon footprint. This framework too can also help solve many other challenges such as fraud, unethical advertising and more. The basis of the framework is responsibility, rewarding good behaviour and having actions in place to remove perverse incentives. The framework consists of four areas - 

1) Measurement 

2) Infrastructure Quick wins

3) Media Wastage. Planning and Optimisation

4) Carbon Offset 

Measurement - The first step for advertisers is to measure the problem. Advertisers can choose providers to help them measure the solution. Scope3 seems to be emerging as the data provider in this space and that data is being added to specialist providers like Good Loop or indeed to existing measurement companies like DoubleVerify providing visibility for advertisers on the size of the problem and where it is on the media plan. This brings me to my first watch out. None of the data that comes back is going to be perfect, but let's not let the quest for perfect stop us taking action. With that in mind though we need to watch out for large gaps. Most of the activity in sustainability is taking place in open programmatic. This is a great advert for the open ecosystem but care must be taken that we don't end up applying additional costs to the open ecosystem. Meaning that, via normal optimisation strategies, more money is moved to the walled gardens, particularly Google and Facebook. It is really important here that we look to measure all channels side by side. Where we have insufficient information, we should assume the best for those that are helping and the worst for those that are not. For if we do not do this we create a new perverse incentive and reward those that hide. 

Infrastructure (Quick) wins. Because much of the carbon comes from the serving of ads, if ads can be more efficiently served you can make a big, quick and fairly easy reduction in carbon. Efficient use of ad serving has long been an area we at Canton believe in with our adserving backgrounds (including Jos Pamboris who was previously CPO and CTO at Flashtalking). Yet it was speaking with Amy that highlighted the impact this can have on sustainability. Using the right ad tags, streaming video as it's used, optimising creative file sizes and more can dramatically cut the carbon used by a campaign and something we all should do. 

Cutting Media Wastage - Planning and Optimisation. If programmatic 2.0 (see previous article) can do anything, it can cut wastage. This is where I believe the biggest sustainable benefit is to be had and where other benefits can also be added to allow for a more ethical advertising world. Serving ads that are never seen is clearly a waste of carbon. Fraud is also a huge issue, fraudsters love to render ads on invisible pages costing huge amounts of energy (paid for by ad dollars that should be going to publishers). The way to fix this (and serendipitously to run better advertising) is to focus on quality inventory. This then needs to be part of the planning and optimisation process. We encourage advertisers to work much harder on the supply path and look to get more direct and private deals with quality publishers, benefiting sustainability but also identity, fraud and much else. Tying in sustainability with attention and quality metrics is also very interesting and I have seen some fascinating studies from the team at Adelaide, thanks to Marc Guildman. Specialist providers can also help identify media options that are particularly effective for media with low carbon impact. 

Carbon Offset. Even with great efforts on the above carbon will still be produced. This is where the carbon offset comes in. Good Loop for example offers a way of offsetting through their brilliantly named Tree PM setup with a solution that is approved by the WWF. Other solutions are available of course and can tie into Brands’ efforts elsewhere in this space. I would add though that for this to be effective, as with measurement we need to cover all channels. Where it may be difficult to get accurate data on walled gardens I would recommend using proxies to estimate their carbon impact (based on their reporting APIs) and ensuring that any comparison between channels is equitable. This holistic framework is something Canton has recently started working to solve and we expect good results quickly. 

As you can see the above framework is highly tied into best practice in a number of areas, from adserving to fraud control to working with better publishers. It is my hope that the sustainability push acts as a catalyst to help improve our industry across multiple dimensions. The tools and the skills are there it is now down to us to build a better future.