The State of Sustainable Advertising: Q2 2023

Emissions data and insights are helping stakeholders across digital advertising establish a better understanding of the industry’s overall impact on the planet.

This quarter’s report provides updated industry benchmarks and a more comprehensive estimate of digital ad emissions. Developments from the last report include refinements to the Scope3 emissions model and expansion of the data set to include more countries and channels.

Beyond updated benchmarks, the report explores new data around the presence of climate risk, along with the impact it has on advertiser campaigns if blocked. The impression-level and market-specific insights, as well as real campaign performance data, offer marketers, publishers and technology providers additional insight into where opportunities exist to reduce emissions.

As the industry moves to adopt more sustainable business practices, it’s also important to understand how optimizing toward lower emissions might influence a marketer’s ability to balance other key metrics, like performance, attention and privacy. This installment of the report includes an analysis of the intersection between emissions and these dimensions using data from industry leading attention and privacy data sources.

Key findings include:

• Streaming brings digital ad emissions to 7.2M metric tons annually. A year of digital advertising (streaming + display) emissions are the same as 1.4 M US homes’ electricity usage yearly.
• Reduction strategies will need to be channel specific. Measurement of every channel highlights the nuances that exist in the emissions of different types of advertising.
• Climate risk inventory is costing marketers. Emissions from climate risk inventory are on average 2 times higher than the market average, while underperforming by 13%.
• It’s possible for marketers to have it all. There’s a 36% overlap between ‘green inventory’ and inventory that’s high performing, high attention and privacy compliant.

For an explanation of the report findings, join our webinar on 7 September at 10am ET / 3pm BST — register now.