Not all media are equal — in terms of the attention they generate or the carbon used to transmit them.
A new study from Ebiquity, Net Zero Media and Lumen measures both at once. Its attention-to-emissions (A/E) ratio divides the attentive seconds a campaign buys by the grams of CO₂e it emits to help advertisers understand the true carbon cost of attention.
Radio is a big winner here: high attention, low carbon. But TV is no slouch and there are even opportunities to optimise the carbon cost of digital advertising: direct buys beat the open marketplace.
And the impact of simple switches is impressive. Among a set of 10 advertisers included in the review, the A/E ratio of the best portfolio of media was more than five times more carbon-efficient than the worst.
At this stage, this is directional rather than determinative buying advice. But the direction is clear: high-attention, low-carbon inventory exists. Planners don’t have to compromise principle and profit. Brands can do well by doing good. Or at least do less bad.
But none of this is news. Agencies have had cross-media carbon calculators for years now. They have even aligned carbon emissions with attention data. We’ve even discussed it in these pages.
But then the conversation went quiet.
A predictable cycle
Why? The best explanation I know was written in 1972.
In Up and Down with Ecology, the economist Tony Downs argued that attention to a social problem follows a predictable “issue-attention cycle”, whether or not the problem gets solved.
The cycle has five stages. A pre-problem stage, when only experts worry. Then alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm. This is followed by a dawning realisation of what solving the problem will cost. And then a gradual decline, as people grow discouraged, threatened or bored. Finally, a post-problem limbo, where the institutions survive but the excitement doesn’t.
Issues are most likely to go round the cycle, Downs said, when most people aren’t suffering much, when the problem stems from arrangements that benefit the majority or a powerful minority and when there is nothing intrinsically exciting about it.
News, he observed, is “consumed” largely as entertainment, so dull problems lose out to the sport and horoscopes.
What this means for planners
Swap “the public” for “media planners” and it fits uncomfortably well.
Media emissions were a specialist worry that became a general outcry. There was a flurry of pledges and calculators. But then came the realisation that the carbon number often pointed away from the cheapest reach — that difficult choices would have to be made to match our initial enthusiasm.
And then the issue is quietly dropped or replaced with a new obsession. Carbon pioneer Scope3 rebranded itself as AI specialist Apostra.
Carbon ticks all of Downs’ boxes. Planners don’t feel the emissions; the people who will are elsewhere or not yet born. Cheap, high-volume inventory suits almost everyone in the supply chain. And a gram of CO₂e per £1 will never compete with a Cannes Lion.
Breaking the cycle
So how do we stop this report going the same way? Downs himself offered some clues.
First, make it pay. Carbon arrived as a stick without a carrot: the calculator told planners what to give up; never what they would gain.
Downs noticed that issues last longer when a technical fix asks nobody to sacrifice anything. Attention is that fix.
When Ebiquity and Lumen matched attention by medium to Thinkbox’s Profit Ability 2 data, differences in attentive seconds per thousand impressions explained 97.9% of the differences in incremental profit across six channels. That rests on few data points, but it suggests that the high-attention, low-carbon plan is not a sacrifice. It is probably the more profitable plan.
Second, build it in. Downs saw that institutions outlive enthusiasm. Issues that rely on enthusiasm lose it; defaults don’t need it. The A/E ratio belongs in planning and buying tools, next to CPM and reach, and in every post-campaign report. Make carbon boring.
Third, celebrate. Dull issues die and nothing is duller than a virtue nobody validates.
For the past few years, brands had good reason to keep quiet. When X sued the World Federation of Advertisers and several advertisers in 2024, alleging an illegal boycott, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media closed within days and many concluded it was safer not to be seen to have values at all.
That case has since been thrown out and the political weather is changing. Choosing radio because it delivers more attention per £1 isn’t a boycott. It’s a planner doing the job well and it deserves the credit.
Downs warned us never to underestimate the public’s capacity for boredom. We shouldn’t underestimate our own. But this time, we have the numbers to make doing good pay. We should move fast before the cycle turns again.
