Addressing carbon emissions has become a crucial part of several organizations’ advertising strategies today. To understand how attention time can help brands reduce carbon emissions while delivering campaigns efficiently, Playground xyz recently conducted a study.
Addressing carbon emissions has been a critical focus area for various industries worldwide. The same is true in the media industry. Environmental sustainability has become part of many organizations’ CSR initiatives. Further reducing carbon emissions is becoming an inherent part of several organizations’ advertising strategies. For example, organizations and businesses, such as Scope3, Yahoo, and IAB Technology Laboratory, have launched new initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.
To understand how audience attention signals can help businesses further reduce carbon emissions while delivering campaigns efficiently, Playground xyz recently conducted a study. The following are key insights and suggestions for the ad industry players.
Ad Industry Has an Obligation To Reduce Carbon Emissions
The UN Climate Change ConferenceOpens a new window held in Paris reported that emissions across the globe need to be brought down by 45% by 2023 and reach net zero by 2050. And the media and advertising industry has an important role in achieving this goal. According to GoodLoop’s Carbon CalculatorOpens a new window , an average ad campaign emits about 5.4 tons of CO2. Several other studies show that the infrastructure and technology that support the internet contribute about 4% of the total greenhouse gas emissions. And this is expected to increase at a rate of 9% every year.
Till now, it has been challenging to measure online emissions and optimize towards reducing them. However, a few players like IAB Technology Laboratory and Scope3 are taking steps to offer the ability to measure emissions and audience attention time at URL and domain levels.
Attention Time Plays a Role in Reducing Carbon Emissions
There has been a growing interest in the industry to measure audience attention in recent years. According to another study by Playground xyz, the year-on-year (Y-o-Y) growth of industry press having the term “attention measurement†increased by almost 900%. This is primarily driven by the fact that traditional metrics analyze an ad’s opportunity to be seen instead of measuring whether the audience saw a message.
Technological advancements and a better understanding of consumer behavior have resulted in more businesses searching for better metrics, including attention time. So far, attention time has been linked to improvements in several brand outcomes, such as consideration, recall, and purchase intent. Despite attention signals being in their infancy, studies indicate a strong relationship between them and brand outcomes.
Similarly, attention time is related to carbon emissions. Many brands today still have a “spray-and-pray†approach, where brands leverage different channels and platforms to advertise, hoping their audience will see their message without understanding the channel’s effectiveness. However, the attempt to leverage more channels results in more emissions. However, according to the study, 30-40% of ads are not viewed, despite being presented to the viewer. This means that for most campaigns, resources are often allocated to publishing ads on domains where they are not even viewed. This leads to both poorer outcomes and increased emissions. A study by Scope3 and EbiquityOpens a new window showed that about 15.3% of ad spend is wasted on inventory that generates no value while still generating excess amounts of CO2.
The Playground xyz study found that higher attention times are not correlated to higher CO2 emissions. This means that brands should look to achieve the highest attention times to utilize the space in which they are presented most effectively. It also indicates that optimizing attention time is an effective way to achieve brand outcomes while reducing emissions.
Relationship between carbon emissions, attention time, and domains
Source: Sustainable AttentionOpens a new window
Leveraging Attention Time to Reduce Carbon Emissions
While there are several ways to reduce carbon emissions in the advertising industry, we will focus on utilizing attention time to reduce the CO2 footprint.
Approach 1: Arbitrarily remove domains emitting large amounts of CO2
The first approach is a simple one. Brands should assess all the domains they are present in and identify the impact of their presence in these domains on the overall emissions. While there is no linear relationship between the attention time given to an ad and the CO2 it emits, there is a relationship between a domain and emissions. It indicates that arbitrarily removing a domain reduces carbon emissions significantly without negatively affecting the attention time of the overall campaign. The study shows that the effects are more obvious after removing 20-25% of the worst offending domains.
That said, there are problems with the approach. Specifically, arbitrarily removing domains means that the brand may forgo the opportunity to be present across domains where they could have a proven record of reaching their audiences and driving business outcomes. Instead, a better approach would be for publishers to understand what contributes to more emissions across their domains and work with tech vendors to measure accurately and take actions to reduce emissions.
See more: IAB Tech Lab Launches New Initiative To Help Reduce Carbon Emissions
Approach 2: Optimize a minimal level of attention time to reduce waste
Another way of reducing emissions is to reduce the amount of advertising that occurs where attention time is negligible. About 30-40% of ads receive no attention time. If brands optimize campaigns using attention time and redistribute impressions where attention time is zero to other domains, waste will fall.
While this approach is far more effective than the first approach, brands should look to combine this approach with another approach, one in which the campaign is optimized toward the highest achievable attention times.Â
Approach 3: Use attention time to optimize the most suitable environment
The first two approaches focus mainly on removing cases with either low attention or high emissions. The third approach requires brands to consider optimization strategies that focus on both improving attention time and reducing emissions simultaneously. This relies on brands selecting the most suitable environments in which to publish ads. Both academic and commercial studies show that brand outcomes are higher when the brand message and the context within which it is placed match. This also has a large bearing on the attention it receives.
The study found that when holding the 300×250 format constant, attention time fluctuated 72% on average between various brands on the same domain, despite emissions being mostly unchanged. Further, in about 87% of the cases, the difference in the attention time allocated to different brands in the same domain was over 25%. In about 60% of cases, the difference in attention time for two brands on the same domain was over 50%.
Since the environment seems to play an integral role in how well an ad can gain attention, a subsequent analysis should investigate the relationship between message congruence and emissions. The ideal solution is to select environments where attention time is higher than average while emissions are lower than average.
Preliminary findings suggest volatility in attention time and the need for continually optimizing it. In about 80% of cases, the importance of congruence is overlooked. By not considering the congruence between the ad and the environment within which it is placed, brands miss considerable opportunities to increase attention time and reduce emissions.
What This Means for Brands
As governments and consumers push brands to consider environmental sustainability, online advertising provides them significant opportunities to make an impact. The findings from the study provide evidence that optimizing on attention time is a strategy that helps brands mitigate carbon emissions. For brands considering ways to reduce CO2 emissions, the data reveals that changes to how campaigns are run can have a significant and positive impact without compromising a campaign’s outcomes. By adopting carbon-related KPIs using insights into emissions, which organizations like Scope3 now provide, brands can expect significant benefits at relatively low costs.
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