Cut Carbon, Boost Performance: The Case for Always on Sustainable Media Tools

Sustainable media buying increases advertising campaign efficiency, but not all decarbonization solutions are equal.

In a study with six major brands, Scope3 and the ANA tested a number of reduction techniques to understand the impact on both performance and carbon emissions. The techniques ran the gamut from manually updated solutions to fully automated alternatives.

The results showed a clear hierarchy of effectiveness. Automated solutions work better than manual solutions for cutting carbon and boosting campaign efficiency.

Understanding the hierarchy of decarbonization solutions

Inclusion lists are media planning documents that tightly define what inventory a brand should buy, and can be used to identify carbon-efficient, high-quality media. While useful, they can balloon media spend as the advertisers using them are competing for the same inventory.

Exclusion lists identify inventory sources brands should block due to high levels of carbon emissions, which often correlates to low-quality inventory such as made-for-advertising sites. In order to be most effective, inclusion and exclusion lists must be manually updated as often as possible.

Automated solutions take the idea of inclusion and exclusion lists (optimizing for low-carbon, high-quality inventory) and help it reach its full potential by automating inclusion and exclusion. Using automated decarbonization solutions, brands can dynamically block high-climate-risk inventory and target low-emitting sources while optimizing for business outcomes, too. Plus, automated solutions don’t require manual upkeep, so they reduce the risk of human error while saving a marketer’s time.

Scope3 offers two fast and easy-to-execute automated solutions that slash advertising-related carbon emissions and boost efficiency: Green Media Products (GMPs) and Climate Shield.

The below graph shows the impact of various reduction strategies on a campaign of 7M impressions. Applying no reduction solutions resulted in nearly 1.7 million grams of CO2, deploying inclusion lists reduced total emissions by only 115,000 grams of CO2, and impressively, using GMPs avoided more than double the carbon emissions as inclusion lists alone. With GMPs, the carbon emissions avoided was about 265K grams of CO2.

To put that savings into perspective, that’s about the same climate impact as someone switching to a plant-based diet 2 days a week for an entire year.

(source: ANA and Scope3 Report, Sustainability in Media Planning, September 2024. Real-time decarbonization solutions, like Scope3 GMPs, offer the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions from campaigns while maintaining performance)

Achieving decarbonization and efficiency gains with automated solutions

Thousands of brands have already leveraged Scope3’s automated solutions and seen the benefits of lower-carbon, higher-efficiency campaigns.

Scope3 worked with Amnet France and The Trade Desk to decarbonize its ad campaigns with Climate Shield, an automated solution that dynamically blocks climate risk inventory and self-adjusts as emissions fluctuate within and across publishers. Amnet activated Climate Shield pre-bid segments via The Trade Desk to filter out inventory with high carbon emissions, and saw a 25% reduction in CO2 per impression. It also saw improvements from an efficiency perspective: a 27% reduction in eCPM and 29% reduction in CPCV post-activation.

A major medical insurance provider used Climate Shield via their DSP, The Trade Desk, to reduce the carbon emissions of their campaign without impacting ad performance.

Another brand from the ANA sustainability study tested manually-updated inclusion lists and automated GMPs to reduce carbon emissions without impacting ad performance. Tests were run through a combination of DV360 and The Trade Desk, which GMPs running through TTD.

When only using inclusion lists, the brand saw a 7% reduction in gCO2PM and a 1.4% reduction in eCPM compared to pre-optimization numbers. However, when using GMPs, it saw a 16% reduction in gCO2PM and a 7% reduction in eCPM. GMPs were 2.3 times better at reducing carbon and a whopping 28 times better at reducing eCPM than inclusion lists.

Brands that want to take the first step toward decarbonizing their advertising campaigns and making digital advertising more sustainable can now easily access these automated solutions. See for yourself how effective Climate Shield is by turning on its capabilities in The Trade Desk, and download the Sustainability in Media Planning report today to learn more about the results major brands are already seeing.

Reach out to us to learn more about how you can reduce carbon and waste in your campaigns.