CANNES – The advertising industry is in the early stages of working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from marketing activities. With the realization of how much fossil-fuel energy is consumed by computer networks that automate parts of the media marketplace, ad-tech companies such as Sharethrough are looking at ways to achieve sustainability goals without negatively affecting the performance of advertising campaigns.
Driving Sustainability In Digital Media ‘A Collective Responsibility’: Sharethrough’s CMO Skinazi
“As an ad exchange we manage billions of impressions and ad requests every day, and we realized by decreasing our infra cost, we were also decreasing our carbon footprint,” Benoit Skinazi, chief marketing officer at global ad exchange Sharethrough, said in this fireside chat with John Osborn, director of sustainability group Ad Net Zero, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“We’ve taken measures internally to start lowering our own emissions, like travel policies and things like that,” Skinazi said. “With our clients came the idea of what if we were able to deliver carbon-neutral campaigns.”
Sharethrough last year launched green media products that have been used by more than 7,500 brands. Its green private marketplaces (PMPs) aim to minimize their carbon footprint by removing what are considered high-emissions websites. Those media outlets include what are known as “made for advertising” (MFA) sites that focus on generating traffic with clickbait headlines, and show lots of ads next to low-quality content.
“We’ve run many, many tests on all the campaigns delivered and using our sustainability product, and we’ve seen an increase in performance for most of them,” Skinazi said. “The truth is when you clean the inventory and you remove most of the time high-emission websites, they are not the most qualified websites as well.”
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You’re watching coverage of the Sustainability & Responsible Marketing Summit at Cannes Lions 2023, presented by Adlook & Sharethrough. For more videos from Beet.TV’s Cannes Lions 2023 coverage, please visit this page.
