Here, June Cheung, head of JAPAC at Scope3, explains that digital advertising faces a new sustainability issue — and it’s not Made-for-Advertising or MFA (not the Media Federation of Australia, if you were wondering) — it’s wasteful problematic ad placements.
Over the last couple of years, there has been a step change in awareness about the role digital advertising has in generating carbon emissions.
And this awareness has turned into action. But it sometimes feels like it’s slow going.
It was back in 2022 that Made-for-Advertising (MFA) websites were outed as one of the prime offenders (wasting vast sums of money and generating high volumes of carbon). With more brands and their agencies becoming aware of the problem, I was hopeful the sites would begin to attract fewer advertising dollars as mechanisms were put in place to avoid them.
Whilst it’s clear more needs to be done — DoubleVerify’s latest Global Insights Report showed that MFA is still a significant problem with MFA impression volume increasing 19% year-over-year – it’s also clear that there is growing momentum to effect change.
Last month, the IAB Australia didn’t mince its words when it issued a warning about the “blatant waste” of investment for brands and released a Made-for-Advertising guidance paper with clear definitions and recommendations to help address the situation.
I encourage marketers to take the time to read the guidance paper because when wasteful inventory is minimised, marketer outcomes improve, quality publishers capture more of what they deserve and carbon emissions are reduced.
However, as the industry continues to slowly chip away at MFA sites, there remain other, let’s call them, ‘murky’ practices on the sell-side of the industry that can be seen looking at more granular data.
If you dig into the data just one step deeper than domain level and consider each individual ad slot, you’ll discover what we describe as problematic placements.
Problematic ad placements are – well, problematic. Generally, they’re ad placements on a site that are never seen. Rendering out of consumer view and quick auto refresh rates are two common characteristics. Ad placements that auto-refresh in under five seconds, for example, appear to exist purely for the purpose of maximising revenue with no regard for the consumer experience.
These, along with the 25-29 per cent of ads that are never seen (DoubleVerify’s latest report reveals global viewability is sitting at 71 per cent for display and 75 per cent for video) don’t deliver any value to the brand. They are also bad for the planet because they come at a carbon cost: a double whammy of lost media dollars and unnecessary carbon emissions.
The carbon cost of problematic placements
You might assume that there’s a high correlation between MFA sites and these problematic ad placements and therefore, by optimising to eliminate MFA sites, the risk of spending money on these ad slots is diminished. However, this is not the case.
Using aggregated traffic data, we found little overlap between the MFA websites, problematic placements, and other high-emission inventory.
Problem-solving
The challenge for the advertising industry is that for years we have focused on refining domain lists to include or exclude from campaigns to ensure ads appear in a brand-safe environment. Domain lists were a good start, but they’re not granular or dynamic enough for the modern internet.
Fortunately, thanks to the work of the IAB Tech Lab we now have a mechanism to build inventory foundations around placement-level decisioning: the Global Placement ID which enables solutions to block problematic placements as well as MFA and other climate high-emission sites.
This means, as an industry, we now have the opportunity to further reduce wasted ad spend, improve marketing outcomes, cut off financial supply to unscrupulous bad actors and prevent unnecessary carbon emissions.
Let’s add problematic placements to the list of things the advertising industry needs to kick to the curb to reduce media wastage.
