Exploring ways to cut carbon
Intrigued? The ad you just experienced is part of our campaign to tackle carbon emissions in high-impact advertising. High emissions in our industry is a challenge, and it's crucial to break down every component to find ways to cut unnecessary carbon emissions from the advertising landscape - this is why we're conducting live experiments aimed at reducing carbon emissions in high-impact creative campaigns, striving to lead the change towards a more sustainable advertising landscape.
This is how we did it
The test consists of two different high impact creatives where CO2 measurements* will be applied. To ensure the reliability and authenticity of our test, the original campaign closely mirrors a standard full-screen creative (Midscroll) delivered through our Madington Station platform. Our platform per default optimizes uploaded assets to a maximum weight of 300 kB since we know unnecessary creative weight can have a negative effect on both performance and CO2 emissions. To further explore emission reduction, our designers have challenged themselves with what we call a second “Super optimized” campaign, where they have taken additional measures to further reduce creative weight.
*CO2 measurements are done using the Scope3 API.
Optimization
It's worth noting that while our ads are optimized according to our Madington Station Platform, we've observed that ads from other vendors might exceed these limits significantly. This comparison underscores our commitment to showcasing the benefits of minimizing carbon emissions by comparing a creative that is already optimized for efficiency with potentially further optimization. The creator of the ad was able to reduce the creative weight by 50%. Read more about the optimizations done below.
Compare the campaigns:
Campaign 1: Original Madington Optimized campaign
Usage of HTML/CSS animations instead of video
Compressed background image
Usage of vector graphics
Minified code
Weight 300 kB
Campaign 2: “Super Optimized Madington campaign”
Parts of background image slightly smoothed to reduce noise
Vector graphics with united and compounded paths
Font library limited to only used characters
Extra compressed code
Weight 150 kB (-50%)
Results
We ran the campaign as a fullscreen and topscoll ad on live sites in sweden, the campaign was live for two days and in total delivered around 300,000 Impressions.
Original Creative
Impressions: 142803
gCO2: 3702.04
gCO2PM: 25.92411799
Super optimized Creative
Impressions: 144624
gCO2: 2486.78
gCO2PM: 17.19479561
Reduction
gCO2: -1215.26
gCO2: -32.83%
gCO2PM: -33.67%
Equals: 1,215 grams of CO2 would allow a single passenger to travel about 45 kilometers on a train in Sweden.
What about the cache
When a creative is shown for a user the browser will cache the creative assets which will equal saved CO2 emission from the asset transfer the next time the creative is shown for the specific user on the same device and browser. For testing Purposes to avoid caching skewing the data the campaign was booked with a frequency of 1 per lifetime.
Measurement
Measurements have been done using the Scope3 Creative emission API which will give a generalized view of the carbon footprint of a creative during the consumer view phase. This includes estimated device- and distribution emissions.
The test is done in collaboration with:
To find out more contact:
