As sustainability moves up the agenda for brands and agencies, reach and performance are no longer the sole critical outcomes of a campaign – environmental impact now also needs to be considered.

In programmatic media terms, the shift to sustainability is shining a spotlight on the inefficiencies of the open market. Current buying strategies in this environment are responsible for millions of unnecessary bids, and the carbon impact is enormous. Delivering just 1,000 digital impressions uses as much energy as one load of washing. The average campaign, in turn, emits 5.4 tons of CO₂.

With this in mind, building digital campaigns that can deliver results while reducing carbon emissions is becoming increasingly important and curation is the solution. The careful selection of qualitative environments and audiences, to meet the specific needs of advertisers, deliver scale, performance and minimising carbon emissions.

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An active approach to curation

While curation is still relatively new, it’s already evolving in response to the ever-changing nature of digital advertising. And now we’re seeing the emergence of a new phase – Active Curation.

The point of this is to address the fact that no campaign is static. Circumstances change daily over its duration due to a wealth of factors, from competitive activity and budget spend to the impact of the news or the weather that day. This in turn calls for campaigns to adapt, so the audience continues to be relevant and the campaign delivers its goals.

But this does not always happen. Most curation is built on a ‘set and forget’ approach – meaning that once the campaign audience has been built, it remains static while the campaign is live. But just as initial effort is required to get them campaign-ready, the hard work of ensuring the targeting remains right begins once the campaign is live.

That’s why we created Dynamic PMPs, our proprietary technology which continuously  adjusts and refines targeting in flight, and the campaign has the best opportunity to achieve – or overachieve – its goal.

Removing waste removes carbon

Curated PMPs offer marketers improved targeting and reduced waste while ensuring campaign objectives continue to be delivered. However, if you’re plugging in hundreds of PMPs and not using them effectively, then the environmental benefit is minimal. To truly make a difference to carbon emissions, well-curated PMPs must address the issue around unnecessary bid requests and responses.

This challenge inspired us to develop technology to take on the problem, by applying a win rate match to every bid transaction in a PMP. In doing so, we are seeing an average of 80% of unnecessary bids being eliminated. Cutting these out translates into a 80% carbon emission reduction for each campaign, without compromising impressions or performance. We call this CarbonSmart.

It is not enough just to say it – we also need to prove it,  so that brands can be confident that the steps they’re taking to reduce their emissions with CarbonSmart are genuinely working. To support our claims, we have engaged carbon intelligence platform Cedara to verify and validate our results, and provide the necessary credence to our belief that curation is a vital tool for delivering sustainable advertising.

Crucially, CarbonSmart is not an add-on for campaigns we curate, but a part of the basic offering. That’s important, because changing mindsets – and encouraging the adoption of approaches that make an environmental difference – requires proof as a central part of any solution. Charging for that proof would stifle the uptake of sustainability-supporting tools, so we offer it as standard.

As digital advertising adapts to the technology and regulation changes occurring, curation is emerging as an essential solution. Its ability to provide premium audiences and improved performance through supply-side optimisation, but with reduced emissions, ensures a brighter future. And helping brands play their part and make a difference gives them the best of both worlds – high-end performance at a lower carbon cost.

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