The Climate Cost of the Internet—and What Ad Tech Is Doing About It

Most people don’t think about carbon emissions when they think about the internet—let alone digital advertising. But here’s the kicker: the ad tech ecosystem is responsible for roughly the same emissions as the global aviation sector. Yes, really.

In this episode of the Climate Confident podcast, I spoke with Frank Maguire, SVP of Product Marketing & Sustainability at Equativ (formerly Sharethrough), about the often-overlooked climate impact of digital ads. We broke down how every impression, bid, and page refresh contributes to a complex, energy-intensive infrastructure—and what’s actually being done to clean it up.

Frank shared how programmatic advertising works, why the auction-based model generates such high emissions, and what’s being done to make ad delivery more efficient. We explored GreenPMPs (Private Marketplaces) that strip out high-emission inventory while improving performance, the role of AI in optimising and complicating emissions, and why industry collaboration is key.

We also discussed how regulation like the EU’s CSRD is pushing companies to measure and act on their digital carbon footprint—and why that matters for brands, platforms, and consumers alike.

If you’ve ever wondered how something as invisible as online ads can have a tangible climate impact—or how business can respond—this episode unpacks it all.

Listen now to learn how the ad tech world is confronting its emissions problem, and what it means for sustainability in digital infrastructure.

Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Discover how technology is reshaping our lives and livelihoods.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Chapters

• 31:42 [Ad] Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
• 31:42 [Ad] Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
• 33:15 (Cont.) The Climate Cost of the Internet—and What Ad Tech Is Doing About It
• 33:15 (Cont.) The Climate Cost of the Internet—and What Ad Tech Is Doing About It

Transcript

0:00

Advertising also has an impact on culture. The words that we use, the communication that is used in commercials globally can make an impact on culture. We have an influence on things like Hollywood and entertainment and there's just like a much broader way that advertising can influence culture and even influence brands to be more sustainable and thoughtful about their sustainability initiatives. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 227 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emission reductions. I am your host, Tom Raftery, and if you haven't already, be sure to follow this podcast in your podcast app of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Before we get going, a huge thank you to this podcast's, incredible supporters, Jerry Sweeney, Andreas Werner, Steven Carroll, and Roger Arnold. Your backing keeps this podcast going and I really appreciate your help guys. If you are not currently a supporter and you get value from this podcast, you can support the show for as little as three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee. You just need to click the support link in the show notes of this or any episode, or visit tiny url.com/climate pod. Now you probably don't think twice about the carbon footprint of a banner ad or a YouTube pre-roll or that creepy handbag or shoes that follow you around the internet for a week. But here's the thing, the digital advertising industry quietly emits as much CO2 as the aviation sector. Let that sink in. Every single time a webpage loads, dozens of servers light up around the globe to run real-time auctions, just to decide which ad you see. And all of that is a cost, not just financial, but environmental. My guest today is someone who decided that was unacceptable. Frank Maguire is one of the leading voices in the movement to clean up the Internet's carbon footprint. He's helped shift the ad tech world from, this isn't our problem, to launching real tools like Green PMPs that actually cut emissions without cutting effectiveness. And he's been rallying the industry to act collectively through the Green Media Summit. If you work in business, if you run digital ads, or if you simply care about climate action in unexpected places, this is a conversation you'll want to hear. But just before that, in the coming weeks, you're gonna wanna watch out for episodes with Kanika Chandaria, Climate Lead from Agreena. Ori, sorry, I'm not gonna pronounce Ori's surname. I won't be able to do it justice co-founder and CCO of Giga Blue. Chris Moyer, founder and president of Echo Communications and Heikki Pöntynen CEO of Norse Power. Now back to today's show, and as I said, my special guest today is Frank. Frank, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Tom. So I'm Frank McGuire. I lead product marketing and sustainability at Sharethrough. We're actually in the process of merging with a company called Equativ. We're in the advertising industry technology company in advertising, and we basically help connect advertisers with publishers across the, billions of, websites across the internet and help them serve ads to the right people. And over the last few years had a, a big focus on the sustainability of our industry. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about that with you today. So people can get an idea of what it is you guys do in Sharethrough, is it something similar to what Google does with Google Ads? Yeah, exactly. So, Google's probably the most known player in this, this category. There's lots of other similar companies in the space our job is essentially connecting advertisers with anything that's connected, you know, internet connected, that has ads be it connected TVs websites, apps and helping them connect with their audience at scale. And we ba basically provide the technology that allows those connections. It also helps the likes of publishers to monetise their sites and the goal of which really being continue having a free internet that is ad supported so that consumers don't have to pay for every piece of content on the, the internet. So tell me, this is the Climate Confident Podcast, obviously, and we're on this podcast, we're all about helping showcase emissions reduction stories and strategies. I don't think a lot of people think about emissions when they think about advertising in general and certainly not digital ads. So walk people through what the footprint of an ad actually is. How does it cause emissions? What kind of emissions does it cause and how do you measure them? Yeah, I mean, your, your point is spot on. I think we did research a couple years ago to ask consumers like, did they know that the internet generated emissions at all? And I think it's, I think it was somewhere around 60 to 80% of consumers just had no idea. And it's not something you think about when you're scrolling the internet. It was a little more tangible when, we were reading more print, newspapers, magazines, like yeah, the cutting down of trees and the, the waste of paper and stuff like that is more tangible. But the energy required to power the internet is obviously less, less tangible. So, yeah, from, from our, our journey perspective, I think it was probably around 2021 where we, our industry started basically learning the degree of which our industry creates emissions. And I think the, the stat that really stuck out to us then was the amount of energy required to power the internet is, about equivalent to the civil aviation industry. Mm. it was kind of one of those moments, like what? Like how is that even possible? And basically what it comes down to is, if you think about it, anything that runs on the internet connected device. It's, you know, there's data centers and cloud computing and all these different basically servers throughout the world, that require tons of energy. And, you know, every time a webpage loads, as I was mentioning before most internet connected websites or apps or connected tv, whatever it is are either free or, subsidised by advertising. And the amount of emissions from digital advertising is, is somewhere around, you know, that two to 4% of global emissions because of most of the internet being free. So. That was kinda those moments where we realised, wow, like our industry accounts for a ton of emissions. Let's not just dig our head in the sand and pretend like it's not that way. The earth is literally on fire. Like, let's, let's do something about it. Every industry needs to be doing their part. And so we've had this amazing kind of groundswell in the advertising industry to, to do something about this. And a lot of it's around education and just kind of learning you know, for the first couple years it was like. How much emissions are we generating and what do we do about it? How do we measure it? So that, that's been a huge part of our journey. And I think like an easy way to think about this is if you just think about like every minute how many Google searches happen, how many videos are uploaded or watched on TikTok and YouTube and Netflix. And all those are stored in, in different servers, and it takes energy to fire those up and, and run them. And then you think about like, as I was mentioned before, every time a website is loaded, there's sometimes, multiple eBay type auctions happening in fractions of a second to bid on that user and get that ad in front of the right user in the right time. And there's this whole complex, basically supply chain of advertising that it goes through to make these decisions. And it hops from different server to server, server and all this, like, it adds up pretty significantly. You know, I think we've, we've looked at some equivalents that helped our industry understand the, scale of this, where like the, the amount of missions required to deliver even just a million impressions in advertising. And our company Sharethrough in Equativ, we see hundreds of billions of impression requests come in every day on our just servers. And we're just one of many, you know, you look at Google, it's, it's, you know, enormous and any other similar company like they're seeing tons of, energy required to make these decisions in, in real time. So you talk about just a million impressions it's the equivalent to maybe one metric ton of CO2. And then we start thinking about what are the equivalents of that to like put that in perspective just the energy required to deliver, say like 1 million ads is equivalent to maybe like one round trip flight from Boston to London, or fully charging over 120,000 smartphones. Some of these things help kind of start put in perspective of how big our, our footprint is. I think if you look at the entire digital ad emissions and how much we're, responsible for, it's about 7.2 million metric tons of CO2 per year, which is about that's about the electricity from 1.4 million US homes per year is what our industry is responsible for. So some of these like equivalents really helped our industry basically realise like, wow, like this is not just small potatoes, like this is a significant amount that we're responsible for. And so we've kind of gone on this broad journey, both at, at our company kind of as we've learned this, but also the industry of like, okay, now we know about this, how are we gonna measure it? And what can we do? Like, how we reduce it? At least our own emissions. And so over the last really three years, that's been a, a big focus in our, our industry. Okay, so. I come from a data center background, so I have a little bit of familiarity with this. A lot of the emissions would come, as you say, rightly from the servers, the racks and racks and racks of servers that are in those data centers, but also would come from the routers, which is rooting the traffic to the different servers and to the different other data centers around where they're pulling other ads from potentially and from the heating and cooling equipment, typically cooling equipment on air, air chillers, and air handling units within those data centers. And then from the redundancy built into the power and the cabling, the networking in the data centers to make sure that they have 99.99% uptime. So yeah, it's, it is a lot. How do you fix that? Yeah, well, I guess the first part was really measuring it. And so, actually luckily right around then in 2021, there was a company the company's name is Scope three, not to be confused with the Scope three emissions, which often happens. This company had a whole advertising tech background and their goal was to help as best as possible measure the emissions from every impression that runs on the internet or you know, any ad that's delivered. And they have to understand everything about every website. Like, you know, where are their servers, what type of energy they use how many ads they have on the site, how often they're refreshing, what is the supply chain like, this whole convoluted way of measuring that. And right as they were coming along we were kind of partnering, trying to understand the same thing. So the timing worked out great. We kind of partnered together so that they could help us measure the emissions from any campaign that advertisers run with us. And then what we started doing is using that data to understand, okay, what if we simply removed the maybe top 10% of emitting websites. So these sites that have way too many ads on them. They re refresh too consistently, honestly, not even the best environment for for brands because of that. If we remove those types of sites, how much does it reduce emissions by? How does it impact performance for advertisers, which is what they care about? So we've been on the journey over the last three years of basically building that, understanding it, launching it. And you know, what we found overall is that like it actually in some cases just removing the top 10% sites can remove, reduce your emissions by 50%. And what we've seen from most advertisers is their performance either stays the same or actually improves because they're just kind of in these cleaner environments. And so this is like, you know, the perfect story. You wanna tell the advertising industry and the types of things. And I think in any industry. Of like any good sustainable product isn't just sustainable for the sake of itself, it's also beneficial in other ways. Like, you know, electric vehicles, you know, obviously you save money on gas in addition to having a, a, a greener way of getting around. So that was a big learning for us. We, we labeled, we call these, they're called Green PMPs is the the product. PMP is a product private marketplace. It's a, I'm not gonna go into all the detail on this, the inside baseball things of what a PMP is, but it's a, a specific thing that our industry knows a lot about. And it's it's basically a turnkey way for advertisers to reduce their emissions. And at first we, we launched it, we were like, oh, this is just gonna like speak for itself and everyone's gonna want it and it's gonna be great. We learned quickly that like, you know, there's just a lot of education needed in our industry. Like a lot of people just didn't even know that even within our own industry that we created emissions. And also like, this is one way of improving emissions, but it's gotta go beyond that. So, we, what we decided to do I think this was in 2022, w e decided to start a a conference called the Green Media Summit, and really bring together all sides of the advertising ecosystem. So there's brands that work with ad agencies to like, decide where they spend their, their money. So we brought together the brands, the ad agencies, the ad tech companies like us that help those advertisers then connect with publishers who are also there and really just bringing together the whole industry to like learn from each other. At first is a lot of education was the first year like some of the stats I'm showing you was just a lot of that day of like, why this is so important, how we're generating emissions, how we're working on measuring them, what's working so far, in reducing. And so the first year was a lot of that education. At the same time a little before then a couple trade groups actually one major trade group had started called Ad Net Zero I think they actually started in, in UK and have spread globally. And their goal is, you know, similar to, bring together all parts of the ad ecosystem. They've created working groups on all the different ways that we generate emissions in the advertising industry, and created these working groups to create like what are best practices that we can then pass along to companies and help them learn about how to reduce their emissions and help accelerate movement across the industry. So we got involved in, in some of those trade organisations and they've published best practices and even ways of for agencies to ask the right questions of their suppliers, their vendors, about their sustainability efforts. But if they give a problem was everyone was asking different questions. No one knew what were the most important things to ask. And so having a more consistent standards of questions to ask was really helpful to then spread across the entire industry as they're evaluating their partners, which are usually based on more performance based things and cost and these types of metrics. Now they have the questions to also ask about their sustainability efforts so they can then prioritise the more sustainable partners or put pressure on ones that haven't started reducing their own emissions or taking the right steps to reduce their emissions. So that's really helped obviously in, in every industry I think it's big learning. We've, we've had in advertising is, this is work in any industry, is obviously money is power, right? So whoever has the, the buying power, in this case, the, you know, ad ad agencies that are responsible for, billions upon billions of brands' dollars of like where they should spend their advertising. They can be the ones that put pressure on the whole industry to reduce their emissions. They can put pressure on, the servers the Googles of the world of like how are they powering these ad servers and making sure that they're moving towards using renewable energy to power those and not just, also not just buying credits of renewable energy that takes out from the rest of the industry, but actually generating their own energy through renewable energy and things like that. So we've, we've been trying to kind of like work on work rallying the industry around that. And have continued to do this, this Green Media summit. So we actually just recently finished the third iteration of the Green Media Summit. And the great news is like the, the first year we did it, we kind of put it together last minute. We were hoping people showed up and lo and behold, like we couldn't fit everyone in the room. It was like an eight hour day where no one left, which was like so rare in a conference and like there was so much energy behind it. So we knew there was something behind this. So we, we moved it to a much larger, we actually moved it to the Javit Center in New York, if, you know, is like one of the largest conference centers in in the world. We didn't take over the entire thing, but a, a large room in that the Javit Center of the second year. And we just finished the third year and, you know, continues to not only just grow, but like, it's just, there's a lot of energy behind it. And a lot of enthusiasm around how we can work together as an industry and kind of working towards this goal of like, can we become one of the first industries to reach net zero emissions and what's gonna take to do that? And kind of. Accepting this challenge and trying to move forward and sharing more of these stories of the third year it's really moved less about just educating and more about what actions have been working, what, what can we do more of, but also spreading beyond just our little industry. You know, if advertising, digital advertising accounts for, I know two to 4% of emissions, that's still a big chunk. But advertising also has an impact on culture. You know, the, the, the words that we use, the communication that, that is used in, in commercials, globally can make an impact on, on culture. We have an influence on things like Hollywood and and entertainment and there's just like a much broader way that advertising can influence culture and even influence brands to be more sustainable and thoughtful about their sustainability initiatives. So this year has really been also talking about how do we broaden our influence beyond just our advertising industry and have even larger impact on the way that the whole world needs to get behind, becoming more sustainable, reducing our emissions, and, caring about these things. And is this a push or pull environment in terms of is this something that your clients are asking you for? Or is this something you're educating your clients about? Because you said no one knows anything about it. That wasn't quite your wording, but still very few people know about it. So is it a question of you going, actually this is an issue and look here we have a solution, or, you know, where are you on that spectrum? Yeah. It definitely varies. Not only just client by client, but even just like region by region. I think what we saw initially, and this is still probably true, is that like in Europe it's much more of an ask from agencies and clients, and I think that's due to the great work of the EU on like, and was it CSRD around requiring companies to report on their emissions and their progress. And that's trickling down across a lot of industries. And it's great to see that like influence. And we're actually getting more of that asked in more European regions. In the US it varies. Like I think there's a lot of excitement around it to one degree, but then there's other, you know, oftentimes we'll hear from, for instance, like the agencies that represent a brand and they'll say, you know, our brand doesn't really care about. I mean, they care about sustainability, but not enough to like, Do anything about it. Yeah. Do much about it. Or, you know, they're also, I mean, there's the sphere, especially now politically, of like, you can't, like anything related to ESG or DE&I is like a dirty word and you could get, you know, you don't wanna get the ire of Trump and have, you know, their cronies coming after you as a, as a brand. So there's a lot of fear around it too. And like they don't, brands don't wanna have to talk about it 'cause they're not sure of how, what the repercussions are. And especially in this weird time. The good news is like, especially in advertising, it's not like anytime you do something, you know, if you do something to reduce your emissions and improve, you don't have to write a blog post. You don't have to, you know, publish this in a, in the newspaper about your efforts. It's just something you, you do as a brand. In, in one case for the good of the world. But also the other case is just like, it improves the efficiency of your advertising. And, and that's what we're trying to move more towards is like, this is not just a sustainability, effort. It's also an efficiency, making things more efficient. And by doing so, you're reducing your emissions and your advertising performs better, and there's just a lot of other benefits that go along with it. So trying to move more of the narrative into the benefits versus just, you know, talking about the sustainable benefits. Sure. So what other benefits are there? I mean, you're, you're saying the word efficient and so it's more efficient, but how are you defining efficiency in this context? Yeah. I mean, there's a few ways to think about it. In advertising, and not to get too in the weeds, but like when you buy an advertisement on a website I'll use, new York Times just for point of purpose and not to this is a specific example, but when you buy an ad on New York Times, you're usually buying, you know, ads across thousands of sites. And New York Times just happens to be one of them on your list. To buy that ad on that site, there's like 10 different paths of different companies you can buy through to get an ad on their, their site. Some of those, exchanges that then purchase an ad on your, on New York Times for you also can resell that ad to another, exchange that wants to buy that ad. And on some sites they don't care at all who resells or sells their ads. They just want to fill inventory as much as possible. And that like graph kind of gets outta control so that every time load the page, there's 30 different companies bidding and reselling on this one single impression. And what that means for an advertiser though is like each time you're kind of like hopping from one exchange to the next. There's like a different, essentially like an ad tax, like, 'cause they're taking a cut and the next one's taking a cut. So like part of it is just the monetary efficiency of it. And so you don't have to, more of your working dollars goes towards your ad as opposed to paying for these like taxes per se. So there's, that's one benefit just from like a financial efficiency standpoint. The other part is just, you know, I was kinda mentioned this before, the efficiency of ads perform better on sites where there's, 10 different ads refreshing every 15 seconds. Many of them are, are happening like below the fold, as we call it, or like, not even in view, and they're just kind of wasteful for you as an advertiser. Because these ads are refreshing and loading in a place where a consumer's eyes aren't even there. That's just very wasteful. Or they're on a site that has too many ads anyway, so consumers are already pretty blind to certain types of ads, but if there's way too many of them, you're even less likely to see them. I'm talking more about like banner ads in this instance. But then there's also the whole, you know, video world of like how quality is the content that you're, you're running your videos, your video ads before the content. And just a number of different, there's so many different measures of like how you can make a campaign more efficient and more effective so that every dollar that you're investing in your ads has a better return on investment for using advertisers. So there's tons of different ways to thinking about the efficiency for advertisers. And each advertiser cares about different types of metrics of what you know relates to performance for them. So we're trying to basically kind of pinpoint all those different efficiencies that not only can make the return investment more efficient but also use less energy along the way or cutting out completely, for instance, like places that are just, you know, unnecessarily high in emissions or just so wasteful because, like the example of an ad loading in a place that no one actually ever sees it, is just so wasteful and that should be cut completely. So we're releasing products that do exactly that for advertisers, and the storyline's great there because, it's easy to understand why that's wasteful just from an advertising effectiveness perspective, let alone the sustainability benefits as well. Okay. If I'm on the other end of this. I have a blog. I don't actually put ads in the blog, but if I wanted to put ads in the blog and I wanted them to be as low impact as possible, how would I know who to go to to get the lowest impact ads? I mean, I know now because I'm having this conversation with you that I would need to go to your organisation, but if I didn't know that how, how would, how are the general advertisers supposed to find out about this offering that you, that you guys have? Yeah, well, I guess there's, there's kinda two sides. There's the advertiser side and then there's the publisher. Like you as a, blog creator or if you own something.com that you know you make revenue through ads. I'll talk about both those sides. So on the publisher side, the difficulty has been historically. When you think about any news organisation or any, you know, just any online publication, you're just trying to maximise revenue as much as possible without totally pissing off your consumer base, right? So Yep. It's always been this fine line of like, how many ads can we fit on a site without totally pissing off our consumers to the point that they don't use it anymore. And I dunno, I would say that there's a lot of sites that don't do that well and like you, you're just kinda seeing more and more and, you know, I, I'm sure people listen to this podcast or anywhere else, like, most people hate ads. Like it's not, I'm not gonna pretend like people love advertising. My company specifically is trying to find ways actually of how do we study consumer behaviors and make ads essentially less annoying and more value to the consumer? And so I, I won't go into all that detail, but that, that's kind of been a, a big focus of, of our company, of essentially making ads less annoying. But a piece of that for the publishers though is like, they're still just trying to maximise revenue. They're trying to be able to pay for their journalists or, you know, whoever writes their content. And it's hard to make, you know, when you're talking about you're making pennies, fractions of pennies every time a page loads. So you need a lot of page loads and they're just, you know, trying their best they can and maximise that revenue and to do that. The best way to do it historically has been pushing as many ads as on page as possible. Having more video is better'cause people advertisers pay more for video, for instance. The more, you know, exchanges like, like Sharethrough and Equativ you have bidding on every impression, the higher, you know, it's like an eBay auction, the, like higher you can, the more demand there is and the more that the money you can squeeze out of it. So the difficulty on the publisher side has been showing them like examples though of like, there have been a number of publishers who have kind of looked at their supply chain and found out that there is a diminishing point of return, right? If you have too many ads that load too often on a page, there's a point of diminishing returns where you actually could have made more money with less ads on the page, Right. Or you could have made more money with less exchanges bidding on every impression, less allowing less reselling of that same inventory to other impressions. Like there's, there is some positive case stories out there of, of publishers that have cleaned up their supply chain, made it more efficient. And therefore also improved the the revenue and ROI, while also reducing their, their own like infrastructure costs. The costs of serving all these ads, and they have their own ad servers and, and infrastructure costs goes along with it. So, from a publisher side, I'd say that's what they're, they're looking at more is that point of diminishing returns of too many ads versus not enough ads. On the advertiser side, that's where they're looking at you know, companies like, Sharethrough, to help them do that as easily as possible. Like how do they easily identify what are the wasteful sites, what are the wasteful impressions? What are the wasteful placements that are below the fold, for instance, how do you identify them easily? And you, what we've instituted is literally like a button. We almost make like a an easy button, like the Staples button that like our advertisers can literally click the Green PMP button to make any campaign they're running, just like automatically remove those wasteful sites and impressions. So that's been kinda the journey we've been on is the easier you can make this for advertisers. the more the, benefits of this, they see the more likely they are to turn on something like a Green PMP. I think that's another big, like lesson that's probably been seen in many industries. But the easier you make it and the more clear the benefits are, the more likely consumers or, you know, whoever it is that makes these decisions is let, is gonna, you know, choose that, that option over a, you know, a dirtier more energy use option. And so I, I would say that's like been the big lesson from us, from even just like a, a messaging standpoint of, where we've seen success with this. Okay. And what are some of the more innovative or under the radar tech solutions emerging in the fight to decarbonise digital advertising? Yeah. Well, I think what we've, you know, we, we we're kind of, we've started broad and we're trying to get even more narrow. So I think we started broad of like, let's look at just the sites and apps and things that are, generating the most you know, wasteful emissions just as a, an entity. And then we're getting more granular of like, alright, let's look at, there's, say every page on every site might have three to 10 ads on it. And how do we identify which of those ads are wasteful because consumer doesn't see them or they're refreshing too often, et cetera. and if we can start pinpointing those at scale across tons and tons of different sites and apps and et cetera. That then also has a further, you know, improvement on the efficiency and reduction sustainability. I would say like getting more detail oriented and also combining that with we're even starting to look at how to use AI then to identify you know, wasteful impressions, things like that, but also having the right levers that are improving the right performance metrics for advertisers. And that brings in a whole nother story of like, anytime you start bringing in AI into anything, especially in our world, then you start thinking about, ok, but the use of AI generates way more energy than any of our, you know, the serving of our ads already are. So what is the, like, additional impact of using AI and how can we use it not just smartly and efficiently? Are there ways of using it that cancels out any, like energy use of AI by making things even more efficient and more performant for advertisers? And that's, that's kind of how we're, we've been approaching it, is the more it can improve performance and efficiency for advertisers. The, like, it offsets any energy downside of, of using ai. But I think there's a lot of promise with ai. And I think what, this was actually something we talked about the last Green Media Summit is as an industry, what we should focus on know, any industry, especially in tech, where we're in, you need to have advantage and. AI is, can be a huge advantage for any company and, and you need to continue it to innovate. And AI is probably the, the, you know, largest innovation that's happening across any industry. So it's not like you have to ignore it and say, no, we're not doing this 'cause it's not sustainable. What we have to be doing is putting more pressure on how those AI servers power themselves. I think there was just some news, I think at the end of last year that like I think one of the major, energy companies is a natural gas powered AI center, that's gonna power the likes of, Google's ai and probably ChatGPT, and a number of other ones. And on the good side is they're trying to find ways to reduce those emissions by 90% by actually capturing the emissions that are generated from them and, turn them into or basically removing that, that energy from the, the atmosphere. Hard to tell if this is real or if this is actually something they're gonna be able to do. We are kind of upset that these tech giants are choosing to go with this option as opposed to, building their own, powering it by solar panels and windmills and, you know, more energy efficient or renewable energy. So I think what our industry is trying to rally behind is like, how do we put pressure on those big giants to use more renewable energy and how do we use our buying power to incentivise those that are doing it and disincentivise that are using that are not using renewable energy. So that's kind of been the, the new focus in our industry and, you know, how do we tackle and that kind of two sides of the coin of AI being both way more energy intensive but also an opportunity to make things more efficient. Okay. And you mentioned that the ad tech in. Industry is thinking now about going net zero. Is there a date set for that or is it just a kind of pie in the sky? Nice to have, and we all know that when you are getting emissions out of a system, the first 70, 80% is low hanging fruit. Typically the last 20, 30% is the real hard to abate stuff, so. If there is a target in place, are there plans on how to get there, how to get to that full net zero? Yeah. I mean the push across the industry is, you know, there's that. 2030 target that, you know, we need to globally reduce our emissions by 2030, or we risk going above the two degree Celsius average increase in temperature, which is catastrophic for the industry or for the world. So you're seeing a lot of movement from companies making those somewhere between 2030 and 2040, commitments to net zero emissions, and that's happening. A lot of the major ad agencies, that for hundreds of billions of dollars in, in advertising spend have made those commitments already. They're using their pressure then to make sure ad tech companies like us and other ones are also making our own commitments in order to join some of these industry working groups like Ad Net Zero I was talking about, you have to, commit to within a year, making your commitments if you haven't already. So there has luckily been this like pretty big movement a company by company perspective to make these commitments to net zero and then you know, tracking those commitments through basically you have to do them through SBTI, Science Based Target Initiatives, and they require certain fulfilling of that. There's also been a number of companies pop up that are focused on the advertising and tech industry of like, how, to help them, measure your full scope of emissions first and foremost, like what are all the ad servers you're using? What are your emissions? How do you estimate that? Starting with a baseline and then helping you create a plan to move towards net zero emissions and how you're gonna get there. And so what actually was interesting at at Sharethrough is we started that process a couple years ago. We were still kind of a small, medium sized company, probably under 200 people. And we kind of did that ourselves with one of these tech providers and made our commitment to net zero by 2030. But now we're in the process of merging with Equativ, who is actually a, Paris based company under different rules in the eu. And now that we've combined forces, we're over 700 people. And actually we've reached that threshold where we've reached the next, rules in the EU of how we are required to report on our sustainability efforts, our net zero emissions. So it's actually been a really fascinating process being involved in how doing that on a much more global scale. Equativ is even more global. We have offices all throughout the world from, Japan to California and everywhere in between. So that, process of you know, we're, we're starting to think about. First understanding where are our greatest amount of emissions? Mostly from like the servers we use for instance. Also things like business travel and other things. Where can we make, you know, immediate changes to our policies around both travel, but also like we're even rethinking where some of our servers are. Like we realise some of our servers are in either countries or states that use, dirtier energy, coal powered, or you know, whatever, whatever it is. And moving those to, countries or places that have more access to renewable energy which will immediately have a significant impact on our reduction of our emissions. So, which been great to see like the, this process, but also like what goes into, like, how do you plan this as a company and think more holistically like in all your business decisions. Then, you know, because sustainability has become a key value of our, our company. It's not just something we have like, oh, let, let's write it on our website and our values, and that's it. Like, it's something you actually have to live and becomes part of your business decisions, which I think is the key thing for any organisation to become more sustainable is how do you make this part of your business decisions? And luckily things like the CSRD like holds you accountable and you have to then which I think those forcing functions are, are great and I applaud those and we need more of those in the US Yeah. they actually are coming state by state. There's gonna become more of those requirements that hopefully the federal government doesn't shut down as they come through. But, which I think is gonna go a long way into, going from companies that are leaned into it are the only ones doing it to companies have to do it because the, you know, the policies require you. Sure for people who are listening, regular internet users. What can they do, if anything, to reduce their personal share of the digital carbon pie? Now, on the intro call, I did mention that I'm a bit of a freeloader in that sense, and I, I explained that I am personally using a product called Pi-hole, which is, it's actually free because it's open source. And you put it on a little Raspberry pi computer, but basically you can get it pre-installed. And what it does is it acts as a little DNS server on your network. So here in my home environment, for example, it's just another device plugged into the wall. It's got its own IP address. It serves as a DNS server for the entire network. And when you load a page. Any page on the internet that has ads, the page that has ads then puts out a call to the ad servers, and the Pi-hole has a blacklist of all the ad servers. So that call out to the ad servers, never gets to the ad servers. It gets dumped. And so the page loads and you're not pulling in anything. You're not, the call isn't going out to the ad server, so they're never hit. So there's a massive reduction there in both network traffic on the network and the carbon footprint of any pages that we load on this home network here. So that's one. Now I know it's a little geeky, and that's not the same as having an ad blocker on your device because when you have an ad blocker in your device, it does pull the traffic in. It just doesn't display it. So for people listening who maybe not as geeky as me and maybe wouldn't know how to install a Pi-hole, although it's not that complicated. What are other steps they can take to reduce their share of the carbon pie? Yeah, I mean, of course like, you know, one of the ways is, know, cutting off ads at the server level and making sure these auctions never happen. Obviously if this is done at large enough scale, that means the internet just wouldn't be free anymore though, because these, none of these publishers could, could survive. I would love to see a version of that that cuts off servers that are running on you know, dirty energy versus renewable energy. That'd be an awesome way to you know, maybe we'll talk to the Pi-hole people about how they can It's open source. Right? Yeah. There we go. But I think from a broader level, it's hard to tell consumers to limit their internet usage because of the emissions factor. Like, no one's gonna do that. I think you can think about things like, especially with the growth of AI and knowing, I, I forget the stats are, but like, if you look at the, the stats of how much energy is required on a single AI prompt versus say like a Google search, it's like 30 times more. Especially if you're generating images, then it's like a hundred times more. It just takes so much more computing power. So think that's, especially as we look into the future of where like the, the biggest changes you can make. Don't just, yeah, I know. It's fun. It's been fun to experiment with ai. I've been doing a lot of it and just like understanding what you can and can't do, but also think about like every time you're generating, you know, 30 different silly images or something on ai, how much energy is required to do that? I think the more you aware of that, maybe you think about, okay, maybe I don't need to use AI for this. Or like, how can you use lower ener energy intensive ways of getting answers like we used to. Using AI for more specific reasons. I think that's, that's where we can make probably a, a largest immediate impact of just like, creating awareness around the things that generate the most emissions. I mean, there's other things, of course, that you can do with your own devices and like, you know, making sure that you don't keep things on and running all day long and unplugging things, we don't use them. And, you know, some of those things that just from a more tangible energy, perspective or, you know, let things run in a, in a room that you're not in if you're letting, you know, videos load or you know, whatever, whatever it is. I'm not gonna tell consumers to, reduce their internet usage. I mean, maybe you should for your own, like mental health and other reasons in some get off some of things, but that's a whole nother story. But yeah, I think it's just having awareness around what generates emissions and just thinking, you know, at least considering that in, in the way that you use, connected devices and whether this really needs to be done this way. You know, especially as it relates to ai, I think would be probably have the biggest impact. Cool left field question for you, Frank. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for net zero digital advertising, who would it be and why? You know, it's funny, we were talking about this at the at the Green Media Summit. There's been like, we actually spoke to Ed Begley Jr. Who's, Ah. one of those actors who's been in like everything, but he's one of the like, he's been one of the biggest environmental proponents in Hollywood. He's shown up to Hollywood Awards on his bike that made a lot of news and, you know, I think in the, you know, decades ago too. So he's been doing this for a long time. So we had a great interview with him on stage and he was showing examples of how like Hollywood has helped make difference in people's lives and different champions of actors that have done things. I, I, I forgot the exact example. He was talking about The Fonz from Happy Days and how he had helped impact the whole industry. I exactly what it was. But we joked on stage that like, like what do we need from a sustainability perspective? You asked the question specific to digital advertising. I'm thinking about this like globally, like we need more spokespeople that are gonna help consumers think more about their, not just their individual sustainable impact, but also how they vote and how they use their consumer good to help improve sustainability globally. And we were joking that like, I think what we need is we need Taylor Swift, we need Taylor Swift, or someone with a enormous following that, says one thing and it can change the world. And there's not many of those celebrities with as, as big influence these these days. But someone like that, they say one thing and the world follows. So I, I guess I'll pick Taylor Swift for now until I think of a better answer. Okay. Okay. That works. That works. Great. Frank, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? No, I think we really covered a large base of advertising's influence, how much we do generate emissions and the impact we can have globally and hopefully, learning I think what, what other industries can take out of what we've learned so far is how do you kind of champion the industry together? I think the one thing we've done really well is working pre-competitively. So like there's competitors, working with competitors on how do we create better standards around measuring emissions as an industry. And, you know, the rising tide floats all boats thought process, I think is key for, a lot of industries that yes, you want to have your own competitive advantage, but you also kind of wanna work together. And if we're all doing this together, it's gonna help improve the sustainability of the entire industry. And that's kinda what we need from every industry is doing this in their own version and creating their own trade groups that are, focused on the sustainability of that, industry and using their buying power. Where, where, who has the most buying power in your industry and how can they use more of their influence to accelerate sustainability? And you've seen this even from like, consumer packaged goods. I took a Harvard Business School course, on business sustainability. And they had a lot of amazing case studies of brands. Everyone from like Walmart to even Lipton Tea. Like, like I think they had a great case study of them pressuring their, basically tea farmers to become more organic and sustainable, or they're gonna move on to other ones. And by doing so, it actually impacted the entire tea industry and way more organic tea farmers popped up because of it and they have way more sustainable practices 'cause they wanted to keep up with that competition. So there's a lot of great case studies like that within different types of industries. And so I, I guess I would encourage whatever industry you're in to, like look at some of those case studies, help share those stories. And I think the, our mantra has always been purpose and profitability can work together. And there's a lot of examples in pretty much every industry of how that can be done in a successful way. And I think we need every industry kind of working towards that. Lovely. Yep. Very nice. Frank, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yeah. If you wanna learn more about, you know, we're, we're two companies becoming one, but Sharethrough.com is Sharethrough Equativ is E-Q-U-A-T-I v.com. There's also our Green Media Summit. If you're interested in learning more about that, that event it's green media summit.com. We're hoping to do one in London sometime the second half of 2025. So, maybe by the time this this is released, we'll have more information on green media summit.com if you're interested in attending that event or learning more. But yeah, those are some good places to start. Great, I'll put links to those in the show notes of the episode as well, so everyone has access to them. Frank, that's been really interesting. Thanks for coming in the podcast today. Absolutely, thanks for having me, Tom. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.