Digital advertising has a nasty carbon footprint — according to a 2016 study, online advertising consumes between 20 and 282 terra-watt hours of energy per year (1 terra-watt hour is enough energy to fully power 70,000 homes for a year) — and it’s likely that consumption is much higher now than it was seven years ago.
One thing that can be done to reduce digital advertising’s footprint is to reduce the number of server-to-server calls that happen each time that an ad unit is requested and served. One of the people working to do this is Andy Batkin, CEO of Duration Media, whose Sequency™ product reduces carbon emissions while offering buying efficiencies and also increasing the time that ad units are in view.
I wanted to catch up with Andy to discuss the degree to which sustainability is now a value in the advertising business and get a deep-dive into how his system works to eliminate digital waste. We discuss other benefits of using Sequency™, particularly its ability to allow brands and publishers to better choreograph the delivery of storytelling ad units. As Andy notes, “the value proposition here is not just to turn the dial down on carbon, but to actually create efficiencies for brands that were not available before.” We talk about Andy’s experience introducing his product into the agency workflow and how he’s currently marketing it, and touch upon the importance of being able to actually quantify carbon savings to buyers and sellers using 3rd-party verifiers.
Andy has high hopes for 2023 and will be talking up Sequency™ at the forthcoming Cannes Lion 2023 Festival of Creativity, an event I will also be attending. “Now, almost every agency has a global head of sustainability. The brands are really asking for it and so they’ve got to deliver. The big thing for us is that we’ve figured out how to actually reduce carbon, versus selling offsets. And the IAB European definition literally states that we have to focus on carbon reduction, and only use offsets when carbon reduction is not available.”
