Video ad tech company Good-Loop and supply chain emissions data business Scope3 have today announced a new partnership which will combine the two companies’ green media tools into one platform. The two say that their tools combined will allow advertisers to measure the end-to-end carbon footprint of all their programmatic media buying, helping them to reduce and offset accordingly.
Scope3 was launched earlier this year by Brian O’Kelley, who previously founded AppNexus, to help advertisers and technology companies measure their true carbon footprint. Scope3 uses a mix of data contributed from within the industry and publicly available data to measure the core inputs and output for each individual product. This allows buyers to see the sum total carbon footprint of all the products and services used as part of their campaigns.
Good-Loop meanwhile released its own carbon calculator last year, which enables advertisers to automatically offset carbon emissions generated by their campaigns.
Under the new partnership these tools will be available within one green dashboard. Advertisers will be able to compare the carbon footprint of their campaigns with others in the industry, and use the insights shown within the dashboard to inform their media planning.
Programmatic media’s inconvenient truth
Many of the major agency groups and ad tech companies have committed to becoming carbon neutral in the not-too-distant future.
But of course, in order to meet that commitment in any meaningful sense, these companies have to understand their total carbon footprint in the first place.
And while the impact of things like chartering international flights and heating offices is fairly well understood, the carbon footprint of programmatic media trading is perhaps less widely appreciated.
Good-Loop’s data shows that 10 million ad impressions can generate the same amount of CO2 as five people in the UK generate in a full year. But even that calculation doesn’t take into account every cost – such as content creation, and the full carbon footprint of the sprawling ad tech supply chain which plays a role in delivering the ad.
Scope3’s data aims to plug this knowledge gap. Of course by doing so, it will lay out just exactly how much ground the industry has to make up in order to become carbon neutral – which may be an inconvenient truth for those whose commitments to carbon neutrality have been based on less complete data.
Hopefully the industry will embrace the challenge. “I’m especially proud of this partnership because it brings us a step closer towards establishing recognised, international standards for the ad tech industry,” said Amy Williams, Good-Loop’s CEO and founder. “With the climate crisis, industry-wide collaboration is our only hope and we have so much more to gain by working together than we ever could alone.”
