A Puff of Carbon Dioxide
By Ruben Schreurs, Group Chief Product Officer @ EBIQUITY
Dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of online ads flash before your eyes every day, so many that
you probably don’t even notice most of them. Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on
your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you
would be able to see it. Showing a single digital ad to a single user involves, on average, emitting
between roughly a tenth and a whole pint of carbon dioxide. And the digital ad business puffs on quite a
scale. No one knows exactly how many ads are shown online across the world, but informed estimates
collected by the researcher Mikko Kotila suggest as many as 400 billion a day.
Link: https://ebiquity.com/news-insights/press/a-puff-of-carbon-dioxide/
SUSTAINABILITY: The CO2 footprint of your digital campaigns!
A study from Ebiquity and Scope3 showed that made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, emit excessive
amounts of CO2, without providing any value for businesses.
The study proposes a way to measure carbon emissions, the CO2PM (CO2 per mille), which was
measured on average as being at 670 grams for 1,000 impressions in the US.
As impressively stated by the study, the cumulative in the US is equal to flying 1.35 million passengers
from London to Paris. Or put differently, it would take 3.7m fully-grown trees one year to absorb this
amount of carbon.
According to EBIQUITY, emissions ranged from 55.2g to 4,782.8g on different sites, and were 26% higher
on MFA sites than on non-MFA sites.
Then the “trusted news websites” had 52% lower emissions than the MFA ones.
So, dear media planners and dear advertisers, contribute to SUSTAINABILITY by dumping the low-quality
MFA sites!
Link: https://www.ebiquity.com/news-insights/viewpoints/the-hidden-cost-of-digital-advertising/
SUSTAINABILITY: Boosts your business growth!
Consumers do tend to reward products that make multiple ESG-related claims, which may do more to
help a product achieve a company’s overall ESG goals while also conveying greater authenticity and
commitment to consumers. See the study by NIELSEN IQ and McKinsey
Link: https://nielseniq.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/02/Consumers-care-about-
sustainability%E2%80%94and-back-it-up-with-their-wallets-FINAL.pdf