Publicis Media has brought a global sustainability initiative to Canada in an effort to better quantify the impact advertising activities have on carbon emissions.
ALICE (Advertising Limiting Impacts & Carbon Emissions) was launched last year as a Publicis Groupe global initiative. The tool operates as a step-by-step calculator to quantify CO2 emissions on marketing activities from creation and asset production to digital transformation projects, event marketing and media visibility. ALICE is expected to get a significant upgrade in its media measurement capabilities in the upcoming weeks.
By tallying visibility across paid touchpoints – impressions by device, GRPs, insertions, flight durations – ALICE’s output helps advertisers quantify the environmental impact of their plans, enabling optimizations and reporting.
Publicis Media’s October edition of its “PubliSees” report focuses on the environmental impact of media choices. Although the issue of carbon emissions is one of the industry’s top priorities, Canada is a few steps behind other media markets in the world, both from an agency-readiness perspective and when it comes to publisher transparency around production emissions. Publicis Media wants to bring awareness to the issue and get the conversations started.
It also comes as the industry becomes more aware of the fact that the increasingly digitized media buying process comes with an increased carbon load, be it in the electricity needed to run ad servers and AI platforms, or the new power needed to for digital billboards that are always on and device screens with ever-higher resolutions.
The internet and all things digital now account for as much carbon emissions as the entire global pre-COVID airline industry. Every hour of TV production generates 9.2 tons of CO2, while a digital billboard can consume 30 times the power of a typical home. Surprisingly, television production is much more harmful to the environment than the broadcast, though outside of content, TV generates about half of the carbon emissions caused by video streaming, which is responsible for a growing proportion of the digital data being transferred globally. The numbers go up quickly whenever anything digital is involved.
“There’s a bit of feeling of being powerless and not knowing where to start,” says Alex Guimond, VP of connections planning at Publicis Media agency Spark Foundry. “It’s just being more aware of the impact of all this. Our first step was to do a bit of reading, then sharing that information among ourselves and our clients, and getting a conversation going. The next step will be getting like minded people advancing the process and sharing that knowledge.”
Guimond also says there are things any company, outside of media, could be thinking of. For example, he points out that while remote working cuts down on vehicle emissions, there’s heavier use of video conferencing. Instead of Zoom or Teams, he has been using Crewdle, a videoconferencing solution the reports emissions caused by a video conference and creates equivalencies.
“When you hang up it tells you there were two participants in a 28-minute video conference…the emissions from that conversation would be equal to removing one car from our roads for 17 kilometers, equivalent to four glasses of water saved, and equivalent to the energy of a household for two hours.”
However, media agencies do have their own specific role to play. In July, GroupM – which accounts for half of emissions produced by parent company WPP – called this out when it introduced a calculator and framework for measuring and reducing ad-based carbon emissions. It also called the ad industry’s effort up to that point “insufficient,” pointing to things like a lack of standardized measures, questionable data sources and calculations that leave out large parts of the ad supply chain, such as data centres and cloud services.
