How brands are striving to reduce their carbon footprint in their advertising campaigns
Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2024 4:08 am
There’s no shortage of expert advice for brand marketing teams looking for ways to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability, and there’s a clear reason for this. According to a Google study , 66% of shoppers are looking for “green” brands.
However, 72% of respondents believe that companies and brands exaggerate their sustainability efforts.
Customer skepticism can be a positive for brands that take real action. Committing to taking measurable steps toward reducing emissions is a unique differentiator when companies report their results.
Google spoke to industry leaders from several major brands about how they integrate climate action into the way they create digital advertising campaigns. Their experience shows that while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, brands have many models to choose from when designing campaigns that take sustainability into account.
A woman, with light skin and light hair in a high curly bun, draws a globe and a leaf with a giant pencil. 1. Embracing sustainability enhances the user experience. 2. Energy-efficient bids boost performance. 3. Reuse of assets goes a long way.
►1. Embracing sustainability improves user experience
A digital ad contains more than just graphic assets. Trackers, pixels, and code snippets are added to ads for measurement, attribution, and data acquisition purposes, potentially generating significant network traffic. As a result, they can be quite demanding on CPU usage if configured inefficiently, resulting in an unpleasant user experience and wasted resources.
Since brighter creative elements tend to consume more energy to display, a simple step like switching to dark mode or reducing the brightness of creative elements can dramatically reduce emissions, with the added benefit of increasing site performance. After Google partnered with Arnette (the eyewear brand owned by EssilorLuxottica) to introduce a dark mode browsing option on the retailer’s website, the improvements resulted in both a lower digital carbon footprint and a 32% higher conversion rate for visitors who used the feature. Ecograder calculated that Arnette’s site was 59% cleaner than other portals.
“Nobody likes to browse a slow website,” says Riccardo Menoncin, Head of Design at EssilorLuxottica. “At Arnette, we recognise the need to make green efforts, but always maintain the high standards we set for ourselves and ensure our customers have the experience they deserve.”
Squoosh , a web app from Google Chrome Labs that helps developers optimize email marketing list images to improve web speed, is one of many tools that can help cross-functional teams keep their websites user-friendly. Similarly, products like Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 allow teams to A/B test variants like viewability, time on screen, and other attention metrics, eliminating extra impressions to improve sustainability and performance.
A portion of the carbon emitted by a display or video campaign comes from transporting the creative to the end user and running it on their devices. The larger the size, the more energy is required. By optimizing the size and compression type of all creative assets, teams can reduce emissions. Moving tracking and measurement to the server using server-side tagging can help. Data clean rooms like Ads Data Hub can reduce the need for trackers by allowing companies to access Google data that they can safely combine with their own.
►2. Energy-efficient bidding boosts performance
Publishers have worked hard to make their websites, mobile apps, social presence and content management platforms more carbon-efficient. Many have significantly improved their advertising infrastructure as part of their value proposition to brands, selling highly efficient placements both in terms of performance and digital sustainability.
French electricity provider EDF is taking steps to decarbonise its advertising by increasing media efficiency with Display & Video 360. Sustainable media agency Greenbids found that the tool’s Custom Bidding option allowed EDF to optimise the performance of its campaigns, reducing the carbon emissions of ads while still driving high conversions. Overall, the brand saw a 17% decrease in cost per conversion and an estimated 13% reduction in emissions.
“For EDF, embodying corporate responsibility extends to practicing responsible communication,” said Ismaïl Berrada, EDF’s director of acquisitions.
However, 72% of respondents believe that companies and brands exaggerate their sustainability efforts.
Customer skepticism can be a positive for brands that take real action. Committing to taking measurable steps toward reducing emissions is a unique differentiator when companies report their results.
Google spoke to industry leaders from several major brands about how they integrate climate action into the way they create digital advertising campaigns. Their experience shows that while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, brands have many models to choose from when designing campaigns that take sustainability into account.
A woman, with light skin and light hair in a high curly bun, draws a globe and a leaf with a giant pencil. 1. Embracing sustainability enhances the user experience. 2. Energy-efficient bids boost performance. 3. Reuse of assets goes a long way.
►1. Embracing sustainability improves user experience
A digital ad contains more than just graphic assets. Trackers, pixels, and code snippets are added to ads for measurement, attribution, and data acquisition purposes, potentially generating significant network traffic. As a result, they can be quite demanding on CPU usage if configured inefficiently, resulting in an unpleasant user experience and wasted resources.
Since brighter creative elements tend to consume more energy to display, a simple step like switching to dark mode or reducing the brightness of creative elements can dramatically reduce emissions, with the added benefit of increasing site performance. After Google partnered with Arnette (the eyewear brand owned by EssilorLuxottica) to introduce a dark mode browsing option on the retailer’s website, the improvements resulted in both a lower digital carbon footprint and a 32% higher conversion rate for visitors who used the feature. Ecograder calculated that Arnette’s site was 59% cleaner than other portals.
“Nobody likes to browse a slow website,” says Riccardo Menoncin, Head of Design at EssilorLuxottica. “At Arnette, we recognise the need to make green efforts, but always maintain the high standards we set for ourselves and ensure our customers have the experience they deserve.”
Squoosh , a web app from Google Chrome Labs that helps developers optimize email marketing list images to improve web speed, is one of many tools that can help cross-functional teams keep their websites user-friendly. Similarly, products like Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 allow teams to A/B test variants like viewability, time on screen, and other attention metrics, eliminating extra impressions to improve sustainability and performance.
A portion of the carbon emitted by a display or video campaign comes from transporting the creative to the end user and running it on their devices. The larger the size, the more energy is required. By optimizing the size and compression type of all creative assets, teams can reduce emissions. Moving tracking and measurement to the server using server-side tagging can help. Data clean rooms like Ads Data Hub can reduce the need for trackers by allowing companies to access Google data that they can safely combine with their own.
►2. Energy-efficient bidding boosts performance
Publishers have worked hard to make their websites, mobile apps, social presence and content management platforms more carbon-efficient. Many have significantly improved their advertising infrastructure as part of their value proposition to brands, selling highly efficient placements both in terms of performance and digital sustainability.
French electricity provider EDF is taking steps to decarbonise its advertising by increasing media efficiency with Display & Video 360. Sustainable media agency Greenbids found that the tool’s Custom Bidding option allowed EDF to optimise the performance of its campaigns, reducing the carbon emissions of ads while still driving high conversions. Overall, the brand saw a 17% decrease in cost per conversion and an estimated 13% reduction in emissions.
“For EDF, embodying corporate responsibility extends to practicing responsible communication,” said Ismaïl Berrada, EDF’s director of acquisitions.