A greener digital future needs a transparent and collective response

Opinion: Partner content

We need a collective effort to reduce advertising’s contribution to the climate crisis, writes Ozone’s chief strategy officer.

Collaboration is in our bones at Ozone. It’s the very foundation of what we were built on five years ago when our four founding shareholders sat across from each other at The Guardian‘s HQ.

We agreed to create a new platform that challenged — and offered advertisers an alternative to — the existing adtech and social platforms that have benefited from publisher value over the previous two decades.

We also believe collaboration between advertisers and publishers will drive the future of the premium web and it has huge potential to fuel the sustainability agenda across our industry. 

It is from this place that my views have been formed about the way that some players in the industry are bringing to life the carbon emission challenge. Of course competition drives innovation and fosters continuous improvement in what we’re trying to achieve in digital advertising.

But some things should transcend this notion, and a collective effort to reduce advertising’s contribution to the climate crisis is surely one of them. Collaboration seems imperative in this endeavour.

Collaboration shouldn’t be punitive

There are adtech businesses who are building tools that enable the blocking of premium publisher inventory based on a publishers’ “carbon emissions”, the measurement of which today is tenuous at best and entirely assumptive at worst.

There is no measurement standard for our industry yet — but the good news is that the likes of GARM and Ad Net Zero (fantastic collaborations in their own right) are making it a priority to define one. 

There has been billions of dollars of growth in the adtech sector over the years, the majority of which has been retained by the adtech companies at the expense of premium web publishers who have not seen anywhere near the same levels of revenue growth, despite steadily increasing audience numbers.

The notion that another wave of adtech vendors should gain traction in our industry, by providing buyers with additional tools that place undue pressure on the publisher model, strikes me as utterly outrageous. If as a buyer you are blocking premium web inventory on this basis – by which I mean reader-first websites that engage, inform and entertain consumers – then aren’t you running the risk of compromising on quality and performance when you don’t have to?

What questions are you asking?

What assumptions are your carbon measurement providers making in their measurement methodology? What gaps do they have in their data? How granular is their reporting? How direct is their relationship with the publishers they are reporting on? 

These and many more questions will remain important as we continue to find our way through this most-important of topics in our industry together. We have already seen very blunt applications of existing carbon measurement methodology penalise the most premium of publishers based on assumptions garnered from ads.txt files, with no regard for supply path efficiencies or how many demand sources being counted in a publishers’ ads.txt vendor list might be inactive. More nuance seems appropriate before any more journalism-led sites are struck off a media plan.

Just one more thing…

We receive many queries from customers asking about Ozone’s offsetting strategy. To those who ask I say — with respect — you are asking the wrong questions. Please ask us instead about our carbon measurement and reduction workstreams. 

In 2021, when we started our carbon-reduction programme our business grew two-fold, yet we reduced our emissions through server reduction by 67%. In 2022, the number of bid requests received by Ozone increased threefold, yet we reduced the average CO2 produced per billion bid requests by 52%. We achieved this through a number of focus areas including restructuring and optimising our data pipeline; directly integrating with demand side platforms to create more efficient routes to market; deploying machine learning to filter out low value bids based on Ozone’s predicted ability to monetise them, and more.

And as for how we provide measurement? Transparency will be our guiding principle.

For example, we recently launched our ECOzone measurement which for now only focuses on managed campaign delivery only due to availability of actual, real-world data. Of course we’re happy to share our methodology, collaborate with customers and industry bodies to make further improvements — including extending the measure across our deals and connect products.

We are also ready to align with future, industry-wide standards, while remaining committed to providing full access to the raw campaign data on which we base our measurement. 

And we won’t charge you a penny extra in doing so.

Dora Michail-Clendinnen is chief strategy officer at Ozone