Beyond Measurement: Taking Steps Toward Carbon Reduction

Measuring carbon emissions is an important first step, but we can't stop there. Now it's time to act.

No matter where a marketer may be on their sustainability journey, they should be thinking about the different ways to activate on the carbon measurement data they now have at their fingertips.

To start, high carbon sites and sites that provide little to no value for brands, commonly 'made for advertising' websites and fraud, are wasteful and should be considered climate risk. Blocking this inventory by default is a major win for anyone who wants to jumpstart their sustainability efforts (while pushing the industry several steps closer on the journey to net-zero!).

Enabling Climate Shield does exactly that. It provides brands with an important baseline protection from excessive emissions, and ultimately waste, but there's more marketers can be doing to shrink their carbon footprints.

In fact, we're already starting to build ways to take sustainability efforts further, faster.

As an industry with ambitious goals to dramatically reduce carbon emissions from digital advertising, building sustainable practices directly into the technology that we operate in is critical to shift how we work. This change isn't only for the benefit of the planet, but it also makes decisions easier and ultimately makes advertising work better.

Marketers that want to avoid climate risk in the packages they are already buying can activate Green Media Products. And, those looking to level up from a base layer of protection can try out an emerging category of decarbonization solutions, Custom Carbon Algorithms, which come with added benefits for marketers (more on those below).

Here are 3 ways you can be decarbonizing your digital advertising today:

> Block climate risk in the open marketplace with Climate Shield. Climate Shield debuted last month giving the digital ad industry a turnkey solution for blocking the worst emitting carbon sites from their campaigns automatically. This solution introduced always on decarbonization for everyone.

> Ensure your private marketplace buys are low emissions and free of climate risk with Green Media Products (GMPs). Green Media Products like Climate Shield are a fast and easy ways to activate reduction. It may make sense to use segments if you're looking for audiences in the open marketplace, but for more targeted campaigns, curated PMPs might be the way to go.

> Optimization at the campaign level balancing low emissions with other KPIs with Custom Carbon Algorithms. Custom bidding algorithms can be used to optimize on a campaign by campaign basis. This adds incremental emissions efficiencies compared to blocking climate risk only at the market level. Using custom algorithms, marketer's also have more control to balance performance goals with carbon reduction - more ways to toggle the dials for the best fit for your campaign. Look to Scope3 partners like Adform and Adlook for ways to toggle the dials to best fit your campaign. Greenbids also offers a similar solution bringing Scope3 data to DV360 for the first time.