Reducing emissions begins at home
Opinion
To truly minimise the industry’s environmental impact and create transformation across the ecosystem, advertising and media businesses must examine their own emissions.
Advertising has a well-publicised problem with campaign emissions. Progressive media players have put significant effort into estimating these and others are beginning to follow suit.
It’s great to see the industry taking carbon reduction seriously, but campaign emissions shouldn’t be the sole focus of advertising and media companies’ carbon-reduction efforts.
To truly minimise the industry’s environmental impact and create transformation across the ecosystem, each player must examine its own emissions in addition to those emitted from campaigns.
Control the controllables
Campaign emissions are technically indirect emissions. They exist within the supply chain, connecting a brand to a consumer, rather than being emitted directly from a company itself. These emissions form the combined share of all the individual corporate footprints of the companies involved in a campaign.
So it makes sense for businesses to make it a priority to get their own houses in order.
To date, there’s been less industry emphasis on media and advertising businesses to measure and reduce their corporate carbon emissions. But this is changing.
From next year, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive will gradually require companies with 250-plus employees and significant operations or listings in the bloc to report their sustainability credentials, including corporate carbon emissions. California has also introduced the Climate Accountability Package for a similar purpose and we’re likely to see more sustainability legislation come into effect over the coming years.
The regulatory impact is accelerating, affecting most companies within the advertising supply chain in 2025. What this means is that businesses need to quantify their corporate emissions now. Many adtech vendors, publishers and agencies in the sector aren’t clear how best to reduce their carbon footprint or even if it’s necessary.
I need to be clear: reducing corporate emissions is extremely important and, fortunately, it’s not difficult.
It includes things such as better use of data centres, reducing electricity usage in offices or establishing new procurement policies. Each company will have its own specific areas for improvement, but the beauty is that these are all emissions that are squarely in the control of an individual business. A huge benefit of this is that reductions often result in operational efficiencies and cost savings.
What’s more — and this is the point the industry seems to be missing — if everyone tackles their enterprise emissions, scope 3 emissions across the supply chain will go down significantly, because one company’s corporate emissions are another’s scope 3.
That’s the very reason that the first point on Ad Net Zero’s action plan is to reduce emissions from your own business first.
The net-zero growth advantage
There is an even greater incentive for the ad idustry to get on board with measuring corporate emissions than climate legislation — and that is revenue growth.
Corporate emissions have become a licence to operate in the advertising world. The same way that advertisers want to avoid certain keywords and low-quality inventory, they now also only want to work with carbon-conscious partners.
This is because brands are establishing new procurement policies to accelerate their own net-zero commitments. These commitments require them to partner with companies that are working towards net-zero. Players in the advertising ecosystem cannot truly demonstrate their sustainability credentials without measuring their corporate emissions and setting targets to reduce these over an agreed period of time.
For anyone in doubt of the importance of reducing corporate emissions, the American Association of Advertising Agencies recently interviewed its members and 58% said clients have asked for their sustainability credentials. We’ve also seen a steep increase in the number of advertising and media agencies that receive RFIs and RFPs that include questions related to the enterprise emissions of marketing suppliers. And this is only going to rise.
Committing to reduce corporate carbon pollution is therefore no longer just a social responsibility — it’s a requisite for the future success of every organisation in the industry.
Richard Davis is CEO and co-founder at 51toCarbonZero