According to Nielsen, products making ESG-related claims averaged 28 percent cumulative growth over the past five-year period, versus 20 percent for products that made no such claims.

It's clear individuals are considering more eco-conscious habits such as weekly vegetarian meals, thrift shopping both in person and online through platforms such as Vinted and Depop and being more aware of what's going on around us through the latest David Attenbourgh docu-series, we don't often consider the impact of our digital habits.

Yet the latest research from Purpose Disruptors, suggests advertising could be adding as much as 32% more to the annual carbon footprint of every person in the UK.

The average online ad campaign emits 5.4 tCO2e, almost half of what an average person in the UK generates every year [source: Good-Loop]. And let's be honest, average campaigns go live every day.

As an industry, it's time we cut the chat, cut the carbon and be less average.

The Programmatic Journey

An ad campaign's journey is circuitous and convoluted.

The explosion of intermediaries over the past decade has resulted in a heap of negative outcomes with a proliferation of third parties all taking a nibble along the way, resulting in data and ad spend leaking out of the ecosystem not to mention carbon, owing to the huge amount of computational power required for each hop in the chain.

The path to efficiency is rarely easy, so Good-Loop built a product that can help uncover and showcase the areas of your campaign that are causing the most inefficiency, whether that's your creative assets, your method of delivery or the publishers you invest in.

Two years ago, after 4 years of measuring our own campaigns as part of our scope 3 emissions auditing, we open sourced our Carbon Calculator which considered the size of your assets, the country your campaign is running in and the volume of impressions. Within weeks, this became the most visited page on our website. The industry was telling us it needed help -, but with a number of carbon calculators already at its disposal, what it really needed was something granular, accurate and educational to help to tackle the problem and reduce our contribution to the climate crisis. That's why we launched our Green Ad Tag technology, a viewability tag for the planet and a dashboard to generate the whole picture.

Step One: Measure

When you append our tag to your campaign, it tracks the carbon output of your entire campaign in real time, considering:

• Region
• Time of day
• Device
• Channel
• Data transmission
• Adtech layers
• And more…

Report In Real Time

All the data we capture with the Green Ad Tag, rolls up into a green media dashboard, which allows clients to understand exactly where their carbon emissions are coming from, and crucially how to reduce them.

The dashboard clearly and concisely shows the real world impact of your advertising, comparing the total emissions to long haul flights taken, kettles boiled or miles travelled by car. Did you know for example, the average digital ad campaign is equivalent to 360,000 kettles being boiled - that's a lot of cups of tea!

The result? Your activation team can optimise buying based on sustainability goals and over the duration of the campaign reduce the total co2e/000 score.

The information and insight from our dashboard empowers your agency and client teams to optimise for the planet - making improvements to planning, asset creation and delivery.

Take viewability for example, in one campaign, we found that 25% of carbon emissions came from non-viewable ads. That means, ¼ of carbon emissions from a typical campaign could be pure waste. Through more informed media buying, let's change this.

Did you know that in some countries, when demand is high the energy grid has to pivot to using fossil fuels during peak times to top up supply? We're not saying, shut your advertising down at these times, but perhaps you could downweight your heaviest creatives and upweight your lightest?

Step Four: Offset and Invest In The Future

For emissions that can't be prevented through taking steps to reduce prior and during a campaign, Good-Loop can facilitate the purchase of offsetting credits (resulting in carbon neutrality), as well as the opportunity to support positive impact projects, such as coral reef restoration, tree reforestation, mangrove restoration - to invest in the future and thus making your campaign climate positive. Carbon offsetting is one piece of the short term puzzle to tackle emissions whilst you're learning and refining your strategy for reduction overall.

Whilst our Green Media technology helps advertisers understand and minimise the amount of carbon emissions they generate, there are emissions that can't be prevented yet - as I mentioned above, not all energy grids are powered by renewables 100% of the time. That is why we offer Gold Standard offsetting credits. After you reduce the climate impact of your campaign, you can also mitigate the unavoidable emissions with Gold Standard's high impact certified projects, the majority of the time we'll invest in renewable energy projects to enable change to start happening now.

Let's Tackle This Together

The industry is moving towards a standardised methodology for measurement, essential if we want to achieve Net Zero. Here at Good-Loop, we believe we provide an important step on that journey. Reach out to our team to find out more.