DSP says it can bid for low-emitting ad inventory

Adlook, a demand-side platform that has just opened to the US market, is seeing green.

The company, which was incubated within the ad-tech group RTB House and is currently operating in France, the UK, and Latin America, has created a bidding tool that lets brands use carbon emissions data when optimizing their ad buys.

The tool, called Greenpath, was created alongside Scope3, an ad-tech company that measures emissions from digital ads. While programmatic bids tend to center around price, publisher, and targeting, Adlook claims Greenpath can fold in emissions data, prioritizing publishers that it identifies as having lower emissions, aiming to “expedite the adaptation of more sustainable media practices.”

“We’re taking [Scope3’s] data in real time and integrating it into our bidder,” Patrick Gut, VP and head of sales for Adlook’s US business, said. According to Gut, the DSP will “serve the impression on the lowest carbon-emitting path” while still accounting for a brand’s performance objectives.

The company will charge advertisers by CPM, though Gut declined to share the names of specific companies that have used the DSP. He noted that IPG has tested the tool, with results to be published later on.

An ad impression’s carbon footprint depends on a number of factors, though lighter ad loads tend to have less of an impact. Made-for-advertising sites, however, are likely responsible for a “tremendous amount of emissions,” Gut said.

Though maybe less tangible than phasing out plastic toys from Happy Meals, the DSP is the latest in a long line of tools aimed at addressing ad tech’s impact on climate. The industry isn’t immune from the challenges of the climate crisis—programmatic advertising generates 215,000 metric tons of carbon emissions across just five major economies every month, the equivalent of about 24 million gallons of gasoline, according to Scope3’s State of Sustainable Advertising report released earlier this year.

Still, the data-center industry, which John McGrath, technical product director of climate intelligence at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said includes programmatic advertising, is “not a high-emitting industry—” at least not compared to fossil fuel, aviation, and steel and aluminum.

Specific figures vary on digital advertising’s contributions to climate change. A MediaMath report estimated that digital advertising activities generate 3.5% of annual global greenhouse gases, including contributions like business travel; another figure from the BBC suggests that the internet, which encompasses digital advertising and a whole lot of other things, accounts for 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. Transportation, for comparison, accounts for 28% of US emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Even so, some in the ad-tech industry are trying to trim emissions.

In May, Scope3 announced a tool that can be integrated into other DSPs, called Climate Shield, which effectively blocks advertisers from buying inventory classified as “climate risk” and “high emissions.” The company also has a partnership with the ad exchange Sharethrough, which has created a private programmatic marketplace that accounts for emissions throughout an advertiser’s supply chain. Companies like Good-Loop use an online tag that “can measure and track the carbon cost of digital campaigns.”

From a climate perspective, carbon offsets are a “valid and important tool, because we’ll never reduce emissions in any industry to zero,” McGrath said, but added that “it’s far, far better to actually reduce your emissions. Like, infinitely.”