2024: Sustainability Still Lacking Financial Incentives in Digital Advertising
The digital advertising industry is facing a multitude of challenges in 2024, and sustainability is one of them. There is a clear need to address the industry’s carbon emissions issue, but there are currently not enough incentives or coordinated efforts to rally industry members around the issue.
Many voices in the industry have started talking about the need to prioritize sustainability, but it doesn’t seem like much is being done yet to incentivize sustainability and coordinate efforts to cut carbon emissions.
“This feels like yet another thing that publishers are being saddled with the custody and are unilaterally being the responsible party to solve [the problem] when, frankly, we’ve been put in this position by the nature of the programmatic ecosystem,” said a programmatic revenue exec at a media company.
Other media execs share the sentiment that publishers are being asked to bear the bulk of the weight when it comes to reducing carbon emissions and feel that sustainability is just a term being thrown around without much action behind it.
At the Digiday Publishing Summit in September, it was mentioned that the programmatic system was built to drive down CPMs to historic lows, causing publishers to “scramble for any additional monetization opportunities they can find.”
Despite some companies arguing they are working to reduce carbon emissions, the lack of standardization in measurement is decreasing the influence of sustainability on advertising budgets. Read More
