IMPACT+’s Vincent Villaret introduces the most important advertising metric yet: sustainability.

Sustainability has moved from a discussion point to a necessity in a very short time. Brands are under pressure from all sides to up their green credentials – whether regulators, investors, employees, or consumers.

In this week’s episode, we speak to Vincent Villaret, CEO and Co-Founder of IMPACT+, a company that helps advertisers measure, reduce, and certify the impact of their digital campaigns. Vincent reveals why emissions reductions are good for business and how to instigate change at the pace that’s required, even if it seems small. In fact, IMPACT+ has launched their ESP (Environmental Sustainability Platform ) to help businesses accelerate their environmental goals without hindering marketing performance.

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Digital has a growing and significant environmental impact

Digital advertising produces the same level of greenhouse gas emissions each year as 60 million return flights between Paris and New York according to GreenIT.

This startling statistic explains why IMPACT+’s services, which include helping brands with environmental KPIs, are used by household names such as L’Oreal, Nestle, AXA, Danone, and Heineken, as well as AdTech businesses, such as Teads, Seedtag, and Microsoft Advertising.

“Back in 2015, the Paris Agreement said we needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 55% over ten years, that’s 8-10% a year. The only time this has happened was during the first lockdown. Everyone realises they have to put in effort,” Vincent states.

And consumers recognise this, a 2021 report from Dentsu and Microsoft Advertising stated that “84% of global consumers said they would be more likely to buy from a company which practices sustainable media advertising”.

Every part of the advertising supply chain needs to get serious about sustainability

When IMPACT+ launched three years ago, the digital industry was waking up to sustainability. The startup’s services were immediately attractive to large brands with clear CSR strategies and the budget to execute them.

Listed companies and LLPs over a certain size are obliged to report Scope 1 and Scope 2 carbon emissions. This partly explains why global brands have been leading the way.

However, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) coming into force in 2024, has made Scope 3 emission reporting mandatory for companies of a certain size. Scope 3 emissions are not produced by the company but by assets in its value chain. In other words, big brands will have to report on the emissions of their suppliers, such as agencies.

Due to this, IMPACT+ is seeing more interest from smaller players, agencies, AdTech vendors, broadcasters, and publishers.

“Our goal is to support the entire industry, to enable them to measure their digital ad spend across social, programmatic, and direct buying, and to support their reduction strategies across all these channels and formats,” Vincent says.

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There are resources for companies that want to reduce their digital footprint

Across the globe, industry bodies and regulators have been working to produce sustainability standards for the digital industry.

In France, IMPACT+ has been working with the digital marketing association Alliance Digitale to create industry standards for reducing the industry’s carbon impact.

The startup has also contributed to the GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) sustainability quick action guide to reduce media greenhouse gas emissions. The report covers key areas in which advertisers can take action, including supplier selection, creative optimisation, media planning, and media buying. In addition, IMPACT+ is actively engaged in working groups on sustainability with IAB Europe, IAB UK, and IAB TechLab.

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A campaign’s carbon impact can change according to geography

Vincent explains that a campaign’s digital energy impact is distributed between production (extraction of raw materials to make a product, e.g. a smartphone) and usage (the generation of energy to power that product). In France, for example, the production-to-usage ratio is 80:20 as it uses nuclear power; in the UK, it is closer to 55:45.

“Information such as this can influence buying decisions on three levels: location of a data centre, the device to which you are sending an ad (mobile, laptop, connected TV etc.), and also how you are sending it (WiFi or not)” Vincent says. “Once you understand this, you can reduce your environmental impact without impacting business performance.”

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It’s better business to reduce rather than offset energy consumption

It is tempting to view offsetting as an easy way to achieve carbon commitments. However, this doesn't make business sense, according to Vincent.

“If you offset, without reduction, you never change your way of production, the problem remains. You have to reduce, and each reduction action you take has an incremental impact.

“For example, you can assess the carbon impact of a campaign’s creative by looking at each digital asset's weight or size, resolution, and compression.

“In any given media campaign we can take a look at the creative asset, and on average we are able to reduce this weight by 30% (or even more) without impacting the end-user experience. The CO2 saving is multiplied each time that asset is served, potentially thousands of times.”

Other factors that influence carbon impact include the date and time that the campaign is running. Combining this data with (historical or predictive) optimisation information can help a company reach both its ESG and campaign performance targets.

“Don’t worry if this all sounds too complex,” says Vincent, “We advise companies to introduce change step by step. They usually start with a small change and when they realise that their performance isn’t impacted, they quickly introduce the rest!”

You can find the full episode and more on our Life in Digital podcast. To learn more about how to measure, reduce, and certify carbon reduction visit IMPACT+ .