Decarbonising Digital Advertising

Advertisers are worried about the carbon cost of their digital ad campaigns. In July 2022 GroupM Australia partnered with purpose-led ad platform Good-Loop as part of a market-first digital sustainability initiative designed to address this to make advertising better for the planet.

Digital advertising has a significant impact on the planet. The internet has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry, with a hefty chunk of those emissions generated by online ads. The electricity required to fuel the $455 billion digital ad industry contributes significantly to the advertising industry’s global carbon footprint. A typical online ad campaign emits 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide – almost a third of what an average US consumer and around half of what a UK and Australian consumer produces in a year (source: Good-Loop). The Green Ad Tag can be appended to any digital campaign and helps advertisers track and reduce the carbon emissions generated by their digital ads. Good-Loop developed the Green Ad Tag to provide a transparent understanding of the digital carbon footprint of brands’ advertising. It is designed to serve as an educational tool to help digital advertising become more energy-efficient in future campaigns. Through GroupM Australia’s partnership with Good-Loop the agency has implemented the Green Ad Tag across display and programmatic campaigns for more than 30 clients across Australia, tracking 407 million impressions and measuring and offsetting 280 metric tonnes of carbon between August and October 2022.