ANA Webinar Recap: Mediahub & Adelaide  Reveal the Impacts of High-Quality Media on Conversions and Carbon Emissions

Digital advertising may not be the first industry that comes to mind when thinking about the global climate change problem, but research from Scope3, demonstrates this sector's surprisingly large impact on carbon emissions. According to Scope3, 1.5 million programmatic impressions for a display ad generates 1 metric ton of CO2e—the same amount of carbon emissions produced by 200 homes using electricity for a year.

As climate concerns grow, it's crucial for advertisers to take meaningful steps towards reducing their environmental impact. That’s why Mediahub partnered with Adelaide and Scope3 to explore the intersection between high-quality media and carbon emissions.

Mediahub has been an Adelaide partner for several years, and they’ve proven that optimizing toward Adelaide’s attention metric, AU, drives more efficient and impactful business outcomes than traditional metrics. So, the teams set out to understand what kind of effects this might have on reducing carbon emissions for a leading travel brand.

Adelaide and Mediahub recently unveiled this research at a webinar hosted by the ANA. But in case you missed it, we’ve got you covered with the key takeaways:

• Traditional metrics like viewability incentivize a race for cheap reach, which leads to low-quality placements that don’t drive brand impact and waste energy
• Adelaide data encourages advertisers to buy higher-quality impressions and reduce waste from low-quality impressions
• Higher-AU media delivered significantly fewer carbon emissions and higher conversions for Mediahub’s client
• The analysis  revealed further optimization opportunities to improve both business and environmental outcomes at no additional cost

A closer look at these insights:

First, we leveraged AU Power Curves, which finds the minimum AU rating that delivers the strongest correlation between ad exposures and outcomes, in this case, conversions. We found that the media quality “sweet spot” was a minimum floor of 18 AU. Exposure to placements above the floor delivered 18% higher conversions for the travel brand.

But what about environmental impact?

Higher-AU media also delivered 37% lower emissions per conversion compared to lower-AU media, and this reduction outpaced the inherent conversion rate efficiency increase.

An opportunity to optimize for performance and the planet

Finally, we found that by reallocating the 20% of total spend that went to media with Average AU below the identified floor, Mediahub could boost conversions by 5% and reduce grams of Co2 per conversion by 16%. 

Committed to decarbonizing media through a 3-step practice—identify, mitigate, and remove—Mediahub continues to work with partners like Adelaide and Scope3 to optimize media for both performance and the planet. And with such promising results, Adelaide and Scope3 are building the necessary infrastructure to help brands reduce carbon emissions at scale. 

To learn more about our partnership with Scope3 or watch our full presentation with Mediahub, get in touch at info@adelaidemetrics.com.