Solving Wanamaker's Dilemma: How Sustainable Advertising can Address Wasted Ad Spend

When John Wanamaker famously decried:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

He was highlighting the uncertainty and inefficiency in advertising, and how it's difficult to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

Fast forward 200 years and you would think we would have solved Wanamaker's dilemma. These days marketers can measure just about anything and everything. But the problem hasn't gone away - if anything it's got even more complex and entrenched.

So why hasn't the industry done more to tackle the problem? Personally, I think the answer is a mix of inertia and misaligned incentives. No one wants to kill the goose that lays the golden egg right?

Let's consider some of the ways advertising $ are wasted:

• Fraud including invalid traffic and non-human traffic
• Lack of transparency into the supply chain with countless intermediaries taking margin without adding value
• Data imprecision and inaccuracies - especially once you start to use aggressive look-a-like models to expand known audiences
• Low-viewability ads that are never even seen or low-attention ads that fit the technical definition of an in-view impression but have zero real-world impact
• Made of advertising (MFA) sites designed to game the system without producing tangible outcomes
• Broken attribution models such as "last touch" resulting in algorithms directing spend to high scale cheap low quality placements - essentially cookie-bombing to inflate conversions

There are probably countless more but you get the idea.

I don't mean to suggest any of this is new or revelatory. We have been having these same conversations for as long as I can remember. It's just that words have consistently failed to materialise into actions. I suspect that for a lot of CMOs and decision-makers at brands it all sounds like yet more ad tech blah blah.

The rapid need to shift to sustainable advertising fundamentally changes this. CMOs care deeply about sustainability and are under pressure from all corners to decarbonise their businesses and supply chains.

We know digital advertising is a significant contributor to the climate crisis. The data we have at Scope3 shows that serving a million digital ads contributes the same amount of carbon as charging a smartphone over one hundred and twenty thousand times. This is the kind of statistic that makes a CMO sit up and listen.

Wasted ad spend is not just a waste of budget, it's also a source of completely pointless and avoidable carbon emissions. If we fix the waste, not only do ad budgets work harder but we can also seriously dent the amount of carbon our industry is responsible for emitting.

Archimedes is supposed to have said:

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

Well, sustainable advertising is our lever - and it might just be one long enough to change our world.

If you would like to find out more on this topic including a five-step plan to create global sustainability standards for the media and advertising industry check out this seminal blog post from Brian O'Kelley co-founder and CEO of #scope3.