Programmatic advertising generates 215,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every month, according to a new report.
Scope3’s State of Sustainable Advertising Report looks at the 5 leading economies – the USA, UK, Australia, Germany and France.
The carbon emissions equate to 24m gallons of gasoline being consumed.
The report also found that 60% of the carbon generated by programmatic advertising comes from ‘ad selection emissions’ which can be attributed to a “notoriously complex supply chain.”
“By changing the way we configure the trillions of auctions that match advertisers with ad placements, we can dramatically reduce the energy consumption of the process,” said Brian O’Kelley, Co-Founder and CEO at Scope3.
“And, in doing so, we improve transparency, reduce privacy risk, and increase the proportion of spend in working media, without adverse revenue impact for publishers and no adverse performance or reach impact for buyers.”
It also found that the worst-performing 10% of web domains account for more than 33 metric tonnes of CO2e every month.
The report follows Dentsu UK&I’s announcement last month of its Effective Attention tool, to understand the carbon impact of digital advertising campaigns.
