One brand’s efforts to reduce non-renewable energy in streaming advertising explained

Much of the effort to reduce this impact lies with the supplier optimizing its supply chain to remove wasted carbon emissions and shifting to more sustainable practices. In addition to factoring this into our investment decisions, we wanted to find ways that we ourselves could actively reduce the carbon emissions resulting from our digital campaign activities.

However, we know that this must be balanced with the ability to ensure campaign effectiveness. Any solution needed to deliver environmental benefits and ensure campaign metrics continue to be met.

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A key insight into where we can focus our innovation efforts comes from the Scope3 Sustainability Report – Q2 2023. This revealed a stark contrast in carbon emissions between streaming ads (706.5 gCO2PM – grams of carbon per thousand views) emitting 2.1 times more CO2 emissions as display ads (333 gCO2PM)*. The main reasons for high levels of carbon dioxide emissions are the larger size of consumer devices (a large percentage of large CTVs) used to consume media, as well as the energy intensity needed to transmit the data of streaming content.

This was an alarming number for the Foundation as we transitioned our clients to an all-screen advertising approach, planning holistic video campaigns across linear TV and CTV streaming. As a result of changing consumer behavior, this shifted budget from linear video to streaming channels and resulted in optimal overall campaign reach; however, this investment strategy ended up emitting more carbon dioxide.

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that in Australia, on average, 70% of electricity is generated from burning coal – a non-renewable energy source that emits CO2. Unlike most developed countries in North America, Europe and East Asia, Australia does not have a nuclear power plant, which, for better or for worse, does not emit carbon dioxide when producing energy.

While Australia’s heavy reliance on burning dirty coal for energy is an unfortunate fact, the flip side is that the remaining 30% of the energy produced in Australia comes from a variety of renewable sources such as solar, wind and hydro.

Therefore, the share of renewable energy in the electricity grid varies at any given time depending on prevailing weather conditions, which in turn affects the share of wind, solar and hydropower depending on location. Additionally, each Australian state has a unique renewable energy mix due to different energy infrastructure and investments in different types of renewable energy.

Approach

To reduce our campaigns’ reliance on non-renewable sources, we had to find a way to buy more streaming video ads when the power grid was cleaner and more renewable, and fewer when it wasn’t. Equally important, we had to do this without impacting campaign delivery or increasing the price we paid for our streaming inventory.

However, there was no technology to buy ads based on signals from the power grid in real time. To achieve our goal, we had to create our own renewable energy machine from scratch.

Thanks to our discovery process, we found a central energy market operator that brings together many entities involved in the generation, transmission and distribution of energy across the country. Ultimately, they are a dynamic marketplace where energy producers and wholesalers sell energy to retailers, who then sell it to consumers.

Importantly, this includes detailed, real-time data on how much renewable and non-renewable energy is being fed into each state’s power grid at any given time – one of the building blocks of what we needed to develop our own trigger model to automate more renewable energy streaming ads .

Our first step was to access renewable energy data via an API that provided real-time renewable energy data minute by minute, but it was still necessary to build a custom decision engine.

To achieve our goal without impacting the campaign, we analyzed historical renewable energy data across different times of day and states. We then developed an algorithm that adjusted for seasonal weather changes, establishing baseline averages for renewable energy sources by time of day and state. This allowed us to only show ads when renewable energy levels exceeded baselines.

Now that the machine is built and ready for testing, we have partnered with one of our clients who shares our passion for sustainability, Sanofi Consumer Healthcare Australia, and one of their vitamin brands, Ostelin, to pilot the ad engine for streaming transmission of renewable energy. They ran a cross-device, streaming-intensive campaign that was scheduled to launch in February 2024.

Once the engine was built, we connected our custom renewable energy engine via API to our software DSP. This allowed us to dynamically and independently run ads in three key states on the East Coast and across three of the campaign’s streaming partners.

This holistic approach gave birth to our innovative and proprietary technology to deliver cleaner and more renewable streaming advertising.

Results

In all states, the campaign managed to significantly increase the share of renewable energy used, without affecting the quality of the campaign. The overall share of renewable energy increased by 79%, accounting for more than half of the total energy consumption of devices thanks to our innovative solution – an increase not possible before.

This was achieved without negatively impacting reach, frequency and delivery rate in each of the three markets. The time of day engine ensured that our campaign would run throughout the day at the average amount of renewable energy on the power grid for those times of day.

All three pilot states achieved significant increases in the consumption of renewable energy used to implement the Ostelin campaign:

• New South Wales – 74% year-on-year improvement
• Victoria – improvement by 51% y/y
• Queensland – 134% year-on-year improvement
• Total ESB – 79% improvement year-on-year

Our innovative thinking and groundbreaking use of data previously unaccounted for have already had a significant impact on the campaign’s broadcast. This successful pilot campaign opens the door to a phased rollout to more customers in the group who share our passion for sustainability for maximum impact.

Sources:

• *Scope 3 – State of Sustainable Advertising: Q2 2023
• ^AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – March 2024

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