Without data to back it up, sustainability in business feels more self-promotional than productive.
Although more companies are promising to reduce emissions and reach net zero by some unspecified date in the future, many onlookers are starting to question whether progress is being made.
Their skepticism is warranted, but businesses across industries argue they need time to figure out the logistics. The situation is complicated by a lack of industry regulation, hesitancy to share results with competitors and accusations of greenwashing.
But time is of the essence, said David Shaw, CEO and co-founder of Cedara, a SaaS carbon intelligence platform that helps media companies offset and reduce their emissions.
A good starting point is to show companies where their decarbonization efforts are succeeding and where more work is needed.
“The problem is,” Shaw said, “99% of businesses in the industry haven’t measured their corporate emissions,” mostly due to a lack of money, technology and knowledge on how to move forward.
Gathering the data
Advertisers and publishers need a model to prove the accuracy of their reporting and serve as an example to others, Shaw said, especially because there is no global framework or industry standard to follow.
The Cedara platform has two main components: an Enterprise tool that allows businesses to measure, reduce and offset their carbon output across their media offerings, including campaign activity, and an Investment Hub for tracking carbon output across vendors.
Data from the enterprise solution syncs into the Investment Hub so businesses can make buying decisions based on their supply-chain emissions.
Cedara, whose brand clients include French drugmaker Sanofi and job site Indeed, also offers a glimpse into how things like office electricity and business travel factor into a company’s larger sustainability goals.
In October, OpenX became the first ad tech company to offer emissions measurement on campaigns through Cedara, which also has partnerships with GumGum, Outbrain and Verve Group.
The most recent addition to Cedara’s platform is a Reduction Marketplace that measures the potential carbon output of ad delivery. This is different from offsets, which allow companies to compensate for their existing carbon footprint.
Through the marketplace, brands can take preemptive steps during the campaign planning stage to reduce their future emissions.
Media’s biggest carbon output
Digital marketing agency Croud and its client, sandwich chain Pret a Manger, were the first buyers to test the new Reduction Marketplace.
According to Cedara, Pret could reduce its data transfer load compared with conventional methods by running video ad creative through SeenThis, which offers streaming technology to speed up video ad delivery – leading to a 16% reduction in Pret’s creative delivery emissions. According to Cedara, Pret could also avoid 48% of data wastage by running video ad creative through SeenThis.
For Pret, a partnership like this provides supporting data to prove the brand is staying true to its carbon reduction promises.
In a video campaign, the amount of emissions largely depends on the device where an ad is being served. Streaming ads on smart TVs tend to produce higher emissions, for example, and mobile the lowest. As bid requests interact with ad server, it can lead to a heavy load of emissions, which is why it’s important to reduce emissions at the advertiser level.
For instance, say PepsiCo, another Cedara client, buys through a DSP, Shaw said. That DSP produces emissions, which compound every time it communicates with an exchange. By the time an ad is served on a publisher’s site, it’s already accrued a substantial carbon footprint – and that’s the environmental impact of just one digital ad.
Which is why it’s critical for brands to get a more complete view of the carbon impact tied to their digital media. Advertisers need to understand “the emissions intensity” per impression by publisher and even by vendor, Shaw said.
One small step toward transparency
While an entity like Scope3 exposes carbon emissions across the media supply chain and provides insight into what brands and agencies are doing through publisher scoring, Cedara is taking a “crawl, walk, run” approach, Shaw said.
Advertisers should start with better transparency before moving onto improved measurement and reducing their carbon footprint, he said. Eventually, these efforts will ideally help create a foundation for the broader industry to build upon.
Shaw expects the number of companies embracing this more open approach to only continue accelerating. “You’re going to start seeing mass adoption [and] mass transparency,” he said. “You’re going to start seeing a much more transparent global environment around this.”
But companies need hard data to prove they’re achieving real change rather than venturing into greenwashing territory.
Ad exchange Yieldmo, for example, partnered with Cedara in an attempt to set a precedent by releasing an analysis last month of its 2022 emissions. Yieldmo is the first ad platform to make these figures available to others in the industry.
Cedara measured Scope 1 through 3 emissions and found that 95% of Yieldmo’s output came from campaign delivery, largely at the publisher level, giving the exchange an idea of what it could do to reduce its output.
“The only way for the industry to achieve net zero is to have the full transparent data set by company,” said Shaw. “You need to know what the total emissions are, not just across media but across every aspect of their business.”
This article has been updated to include correct attribution and a more precise figure.
