The new math in media waste reduction

Marketers are contending with the lowest budgets they’ve had in years. A study by Gartner finds that as a percentage of company revenue, marketers have only 7.7% to spend in 2024 compared to an average of 11.4% in previous years. This can make it hard for marketers to prioritize any activity that isn’t tightly focused on campaign performance. But the climate crisis won’t wait for brands to get bigger budgets or for sustainability to become a top priority.

Brands like Sanofi and agencies like IPG are all in on activating media more sustainably, and in a way that actually helps their campaigns. They are focusing on the positive correlation between performance and lowering carbon, and an obvious place to start is by removing waste. Brands want to avoid waste, whether that waste is in carbon or ad dollars.

With $22 billion dollars of programmatic spend wasted every year (according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA)), optimizing performance through a sustainability lens could present an opportunity to have a win-win on waste reduction.

To make positive changes to both sustainability and performance, brands and their agencies must have the tools they need to make smart choices: granular insights, great measurement and a clear set of priorities to guide media buying strategies.

Upgrade insights to be more precise

Brands know the positive effects of eliminating waste and are recognizing that they need to go even further to avoid more of it. In the past few months, our industry has learned a lot about how to pinpoint and avoid poor inventory at a more granular level, and the time is now to act on it.

We know more about made for advertising (MFA) and have tools to spot it with the right data. For example, leveraging traditional brand-safety tactics to tackle MFA sites isn’t sufficient protection on its own. This was highlighted by the recent revelation that Forbes had a spoof site that went undetected for years. The “forbes3” site was a subdomain, which was relatively easy to hide, since brand-safety solutions typically only operate at the domain level. (Forbes blamed Media.net, which manages its ad-bidding software, for the misrepresentation and added it was an “insignificant part of our overall business.”)

Our own analysis, using Sincera data and global placement identifiers (GPIDs), revealed that a significant number of placements in the top 7,000 Comscore sites either load too soon outside of view or refresh too quickly — a problem for advertisers because those placements are capturing ad dollars and burning carbon, but are rarely, if ever, in view.

Being precise and having a granular set of insights to guide media buying decisions can help brands avoid campaign waste more effectively (and reduce carbon) while keeping top sites on their plans.

Make your carbon count

Brands should think of media strategies in terms of “making carbon count” — any emissions generated should deliver value back in the form of performance. Using this framework, the easiest decisions to make are based on cutting obvious waste. If no one sees an ad, why bid on that placement? It’s a waste of ad spend and a waste of carbon. However, without insight into performance and carbon emissions, smart choices can be harder to make. It’s a lot easier to reduce emissions while driving campaign performance when comparing the two side by side.

Take video ads for example: Video ads are typically heavier than other static ad formats and therefore emit more carbon due to increased processing needed to serve and render the video. If that heavier ad format is not performing, it’s an easier argument to get rid of it and win on both carbon and performance. But if it is performing, brands armed with sustainability data have options. They can either cut from somewhere else or explore more efficient technology options, like switching to ad streaming or other unique formats, to lower the weight of the ad and reduce carbon while preserving performance.

The only way to create this kind of win-win is with accurate measurement. Brands need campaign and emissions measurement that is granular, always-on and comparable. Getting post-campaign reports weeks or months later isn’t a substitute for data that can be used during the campaign to optimize toward both goals.

Setting clear priorities drives the best results

Just as marketers have campaign performance goals, they should also set goals for their carbon-emissions reductions and work on both of them at the same time. Brands and agencies can encourage media buying teams to take action once they see that they can improve performance by reducing waste. If a media buyer has to choose between hitting a lower CPM goal or getting rid of carbon waste, they’ll opt for the lower CPM unless they have clear sustainability goals that are also a high priority. Some brands, the latest being the Lego Group, are starting to tie emissions goals to employee compensation to ensure positive change happens.

For every campaign, media teams need to know how emissions and performance should be considered. It’s important that media buyers look past artificially low prices that indicate MFA or other waste to focus instead on quality. Going a step further to include emissions, brands can look at emissions versus CPMs or emissions per incremental dollar of ROI.

Weaving emissions and performance together in the beginning, middle and end of the campaign will make it easier for real improvements to happen industrywide.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.