Wildfires and the restraint ad tech never learned 

Europe is burning hot. This isn’t just heat wave No. 3 or 4 or 5 or who’s counting, holding its grip over a largely air-conditioning-free population. This time it’s wildfires, raging across major parts of the continent, some so intense they’ve generated their own weather in the form of fire clouds, thunderstorms that throw lightning back down and ignite new fires beyond the original blaze. Europe is now the fastest-warming continent on the planet, and the fires are far from over — some could burn for months.

The boiling frog comes to mind. Drop it into boiling water and it jumps straight back out. Lower it into lukewarm water, turn up the heat one degree at a time, and it stays until it dies, because no single degree ever feels like the one to react to. Is that us? Ignoring the small yearly increases until the damage shows up as evacuation orders.

Ask around and most people will assure you sustainability matters to them. But then again, nobody jumps out because of one degree more. Most people don’t know what to do about it either.

When people think about environmental damage, the usual suspects come to mind: cars, planes, factories. Not digital advertising. And even when it does cross someone’s mind, the same paralysis that shows up everywhere else in daily life shows up here, too, marketers included.

Ad tech and sustainability have had a bit of an on-off relationship, moving from real initiatives to greenwashing to becoming an afterthought, where climate keeps getting treated as “other,” an extraneous fight sitting outside the core of the business rather than inside it.

Of course nobody wakes up intending to make the industry less sustainable, deliberately asking for more carbon emissions, more waste or more energy consumption. It simply happens. One more SSP here, one more identity graph there. One more campaign extended because the marginal cost feels almost invisible. Nothing looks irresponsible, yet when you stack enough decisions together, they add up to an industry built on enormous abundance.

Not that there’s a shortage of guidance on how to do it “better.” The industry has sustainability frameworks, measurement initiatives and voluntary standards. IAB Europe has one. Ad Net Zero has one. There’s supply path optimization, green PMPs, lighter creative formats. There’s regulation too; the CSRD in Europe (too early to tell) and climate disclosure rules from the SEC in the U.S. (too late to matter). What ad tech lacks is a single, simple action that turns a campaign, a media plan or a company “green.”

What has spread everywhere, however, is AI: more creatives, more impressions, more testing, more processing power, more infrastructure, higher emissions — but often surprisingly little added value. 

Yet the industry’s fundamental incentive structure rewards doing more, so these frameworks and initiatives rarely shape decisions. If sustainability is ever going to survive contact with a brief, it can’t remain a separate, nobler concern. It has to become part of how the industry defines efficiency: achieving the same business outcome with less.

If AI’s defining characteristic is abundance, sustainability’s defining characteristic is restraint. Those two philosophies were always going to collide.

Tappx’s Juan Agus Jiménez names the mechanism behind that collision directly: “We’re not talking about the disappearance of sustainability in ad tech, but rather a significant decline in its level of priority. Artificial intelligence is currently the epicenter of the industry, directly impacting business operations, processes, investments, M&A activity, automation, optimization. … And this frenzy has made us forget that all of this comes at a high environmental cost. It’s inconvenient, so it often goes unmentioned, but the problem remains.”

Maybe the inconvenience goes unmentioned because nobody in this industry has ever been embarrassed into caring. Privacy got GDPR. Supply chain transparency got the ANA report. Brand safety’s list of embarrassments is too long to enumerate. Each issue eventually produced a moment where doing nothing became more consequential than doing something.

Climate has never had that moment.

The chain from an impression served to a hectare burned is real, and it’s also so long that responsibility becomes diluted at every link. There’s nothing to boycott. Nobody to name. That doesn’t mean that marketers need another framework. It just means a marketer’s day-to-day decisions need to be viewed through a different lens: small, repeated, individually invisible and entirely within an individual’s control. Like walk vs. car or buy local.

In advertising, each campaign involves choices about how much media to buy, how many creative variations to generate, how many audiences to test and when enough optimization is actually enough. AI is challenging “enough is enough” even further. Pre-AI, producing 500 creatives cost real money, making budget the “natural” restraint. That’s gone, and with it many other constraints and net gains. What’s left is judgment. AI can produce more. Marketers still decide whether more is necessary.

The industry’s next competitive advantage may not be producing more but knowing when more no longer creates incremental value.

In the end, sustainability isn’t one heroic act; it’s accumulated mundane decisions. And the real challenge might not be whether ad tech cares about sustainability but whether an industry built to maximize abundance can learn to value restraint. 

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.