When sustainable advertising startup Scope3 launched in early 2022, the carbon footprint of digital advertising quickly became an ad tech talking point.
One of the company’s co-founders, Brian O’Kelley, is often called the “godfather of ad tech,” so his ideas tend to set the industry’s agenda.
The original thesis centered on the notion that measuring the emissions volume of online ads is the first step toward taking action to reduce them.
But it quickly became clear that the industry was more interested in dealing with financial waste over environmental waste, says Anne Coghlan, O’Kelley’s co-founder and COO, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Luckily, there’s a direct correlation between the two.
Within the first year, the Scope3 team realized that a more effective pitch than “Let’s save the environment” is “Let’s cut out the crap” (while also helping save the environment).
“If it’s your job to hit certain KPIs as a business, you’re not going to want to vanquish those, maybe not get a bonus … there needed to be true business impact,” Coghlan says. “We saw that carbon was a lens for actually getting rid of an incredible amount of inefficiencies.”
Unnecessary hops in the programmatic supply chain, for example, increase energy consumption and create hidden costs. Made-for-advertising websites generate disproportionately high carbon emissions and contribute little if any value. Too many middlemen add layers of counterproductive complexity.
“When you think about carbon emissions and grams of carbon and the models that are used, which are agnostic to advertising, we’re just applying them to advertising,” Coghlan says. “That’s very different to the metrics that we just make up within the industry, like viewability.”
Also in this episode: Why Scope3 launched an agentic media platform, how to build energy-efficient AI and a teaser about a newly launched open standard that allows AI agents to communicate directly across the digital advertising ecosystem. Plus: Why Coghlan only speaks Italian at home.
For more articles featuring Anne Coghlan, click here.
