Digital advertising enters new era of sustainability as industry widens focus beyond carbon, IAB Europe finds
The digital advertising industry is entering a new phase of sustainability maturity through broadening its impact focus from carbon emissions to wider social implications — signalling a shift in how the industry understands its responsibilities.
This is the key message from the IAB Europe’s “State of Readiness: Sustainability in Digital Advertising Report 2026,” which now in its fourth edition has begun assessing environmental sustainability alongside social sustainability (including privacy, media plurality, accessibility, diversity and responsible media).
Notably, this edition reflects the growing recognition across the industry that sustainability is not only about environmental progress, but also about people, equality, accountability, and responsible practices.
The survey was conducted between November 2025 and January 2026, gathering 135 responses from companies and associations active across all European markets.
Overall, the data set represents companies and associations active across all European markets. The top five most represented markets are Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Greece.
Respondents assessed issues across financial materiality, or the extent to which sustainability issues affect a company’s financial performance and impact materiality, or the extent to which a sustainability issue has a positive or negative impact on society, irrespective of financial consequences.
A new challenge
AI content ingestion and traffic dominated the concerns within the report, and the most selected response in the report’s history.
The report does caveat that media owners are the most represented supply chain segment in the data; however, when removed from the sample, 60% of respondents, comprising ad tech, agencies and advertisers, selected this as their top concern.
Luís Marinho Falcão, operations director, IAB Portugal, warned of the wider implications of this: “Local content producers are absorbing simultaneous shocks: declining direct traffic and audience control, alongside the large-scale ingestion of their work into AI systems without adequate compensation.
“This points to a structural imbalance within the digital ecosystem.
“If the creation of high-quality, original content becomes economically unsustainable, the long-term consequence is not simply weaker publishers, but a gradual deterioration of the wider information environment.”
Ad Fraud, a top-three challenge for 7-10% of respondents between 2023 and 2025, was also a major issue for almost 30% of respondents to this survey.
Meanwhile, measurement — typically always the first or second most important challenge in previous reports — has been surpassed by concerns relating to the economic environment, with 51% of all respondents citing this as one of the top challenges.
Addressability, a topic that ranked highest in the 2023 and 2024 reports when the deprecation of third-party cookies was a prominent issue for the ecosystem — has now settled at the bottom of the list.
Drivers: Regulation now leads
Compliance with regulation has been rising in the ranking of drivers for sustainability work, and this year, it overtook corporate social responsibility at the top.
Reputational improvement was also cited as a common benefit, with 62% of respondents stating it was a motivator, and other cost, performance, and revenue-related benefits were drivers for around 30% of respondents.
Notably, around a quarter of respondents said they see no reputational or business benefits, suggesting uneven motivation and maturity in sustainable business practices.
Actions: Environmental is ahead of social
For sustainable action, the report defines a clear action funnel which begins with participation in industry forums and ends with an always-on assessment of sustainability impacts.
Environmental actions are, on average, around 10 percentage points more common than social ones.
Dedicated sustainability leads have slightly increased since the 2023 report and the share of respondents which estimate environmental impact across all campaigns has doubled from 2025 to 2026, indicating awareness and willingness around this topic is growing.
Reporting: Progress, but major gaps
One-third (32%) of respondents say they have not released a sustainability report and do not plan to publish one.
However, 64% share environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact information available in their annual reports.
Regarding verification, about three-quarters are open to audits on environmental matters, signalling confidence in their efforts.
Openness to social sustainability audits is 15 percentage points lower, reflecting a gap in action.
Chief executive, ABC UK, Simon Redlich, emphasised the role of independent verification in building trust.
He says: “As sustainability commitments move from ambition to action, independent verification comes into its own.
“Third-party auditing brings clarity, consistency, and credibility, helping businesses demonstrate their progress and giving the market confidence in the claims being made.
“Transparent measurement is fundamental to building long-term trust.”
Assessment: ESG data still fragmented
The share of respondents who include the assessed ESG impact of the digital advertising supply chain in corporate reporting has dropped by nine percentage points since 2025.
In-house assessment solutions prove more popular, with an eight-point advantage over working with an external vendor.
ESG data requests to partners are low (11%), suggesting a reliance on proxy data, vendor aggregation or limited propagation of ESG requests for information.
Only 33% of respondents share impact data with clients, again indicating a lack of propagation of ESG RFIs.
Campaign-level actions
Carbon-reduction levers are more widely adopted than social-impact levers.
Additionally, practices which are more closely aligned with improving business performance, such as avoiding made-for-advertising sites or path optimisation, rank the highest.
Obstacles: Missing standardisation
This year’s survey is the first to have been released after the implementation of open standards for estimating digital ad emissions.
However, the obstacle of a lack of industry standards has only dropped one place in the rankings, indicating the need for standards in other areas, such as social impacts and standards for use cases beyond emissions quantification.
Emanuela Recalcati, global head of emerging innovation and creative services, WPP Media, co-chair of the IAB Europe Sustainability Standards Committee, stressed the need for systemic change.
She says: “While individual effort on sustainability is admirable, the data shows that true systemic changes are necessary.
“Collaboration, education, and industry standards are essential for our industry to make genuine, transparent, and quantifiable progress.”
Overall, the report depicts a picture where environmental measurement is accelerating, with AI-driven disruption reshaping priorities, but social sustainability is lagging behind.
The industry is moving from ambition to action, but an absence of standardisation is limiting progress.