Scope3 has released its Q2 2023 State of Sustainable Advertising report.
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.
Key findings from the emissions data provider for the advertising industry 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 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.
As the industry moves to adopt more sustainable business practices, it’s also important to understand how optimising toward lower emissions might influence a marketer’s ability to balance other key metrics, like performance, attention and privacy.
This second quarter 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.
Scope3, founded in 2022 by ad tech industry veterans, is on a mission to decarbonise media and advertising and has built partnerships across the industry to raise awareness and take action across the industry: if the industry were to eliminate spending across the highest emitting domains for carbon emissions in these regions, more than 33.5K metric tons of carbon can be removed each and every month.
Earlier this year, the Q1 report found that the programmatic advertising industry produces more than 215,000 metric tons of carbon emissions in a single month across five leading economies, the equivalent of more than 24 million gallons of gasoline being consumed.
See also: Scope3 releases its Q1 2023 State of Sustainable Advertising report