Managing the Carbon Emissions out of Marketing.
If there’s one thing advertising is good at, it’s convincing consumers to consume. But doing that wastes massive amounts of energy and generates millions of tons of carbon emissions.
This is especially true for digital programmatic ads. To serve a digital ad, data must travel between servers, from the advertiser to the ad exchange and into the publisher’s inventory to access their audience, consuming energy and producing carbon emissions during each step of the process.
Then, an entire ecosystem of advertisers, advertising platforms, and other data collects send it to their data warehouses for storage and analysis, more energy is consumed, resulting in yet more carbon emissions. Since those servers are mostly located in data centers, that’s where the greatest impact is created. As more processing power is needed for the Artificial Intelligence that is becoming part of the ads ecosystem emissions promise to grow faster and faster.
Read the full Los Angeles Times article.
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Bryan Bollinger is a Professor of Marketing & George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow and the Academic Director of Doctoral Education at NYU Stern.