For many publishers, sustainability has become a key pillar within their company mission statements. And now, as advertisers and their agencies start prioritizing low carbon emissions in their media buys, there is financial incentive as well to reduce the carbon footprint of their advertising businesses.
But not all publishers are feeling — and responding to — that pressure to become more sustainable: chiefly made-for-advertising sites.
In fact, some experts believe that there is going to be a plateau in the ad industry meaningfully reducing its carbon emissions if a handful of particularly bad players don’t fundamentally change the way they sell their programmatic ad inventory.
It’s not surprising that companies whose revenue streams are dependent on ad sales wouldn’t be willing to reduce the number of programmatic auctions they sell their inventory in. And as it stands, most of the carbon reduction on the sell-side has begun with supply path optimization (SPO), which means reducing the number of ways the same ad inventory is sold.
Publishers like Insider, Hearst and The Guardian have started looking for ways to eliminate redundancies in their programmatic sales processes. But, these types of publishers are already transacting in significantly fewer programmatic auctions than made-for-advertising companies, meaning their SPO efforts contribute less to meeting the ad industry’s sustainability goals, according to Chris Kane, founder of programmatic supply chain management company Jounce Media.
“Gannett, Insider, Daily Mail, Vox, Hearst, Penske, you could split some hairs here, but they’re just normal web portfolios. But when you get to the [made-for-advertising sites and] these are off the charts — like 100 times or 220 times more auctions per user session,” said Kane.
In an analysis of the top 50 web portfolios performed by Kane’s company, many of which were publishers, companies were indexed based on the number of programmatic auctions used per user session. The top 11 publishers on that chart over-indexed by at least 56.5 times, up to 220 times the average. Kane declined to name the publishers on the list, but many in the top 20 could be classified as “made-for-advertising” publishers. He continued that only 15-20% of programmatic dollars even get spent within those channels, but they make up more than half of the total digital ad market bitstream.