Tag: decarbonisation

New York, USA – Following their partnership launch last year, GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has fully integrated SeenThis’ adaptive streaming technology into its carbon calculator tool, resulting in carbon emission reductions equivalent to charging over 15 million smartphones.

Through their collaboration, GroupM and its agencies have utilised SeenThis’ expertise and proprietary technology to manage and minimise carbon emissions while enhancing the performance of display advertising campaigns.

SeenThis’ technology minimises data waste by transferring data only for visible creative assets, which enhances user engagement and reduces the number of impressions needed to achieve campaign goals. This approach also lowers CO2e emissions, as it reduces the energy required across the internet supply chain.

Last year, the global partnership reduced over 230 tonnes of CO2e emissions, equivalent to charging more than 15 million smartphones. According to GroupM, approximately 260 of its advertisers across 28 markets have benefited from this technology, simultaneously enhancing the performance of their digital ads.

With SeenThis technology fully integrated into GroupM’s carbon calculator, advertisers can now evaluate optimisation impacts during pre-campaign planning. This integration highlights GroupM’s ability to scale successful trials into repeatable processes. 

Furthermore, as industry interest grows and standardised metrics become more crucial, GroupM’s focus is on embedding this technology into ongoing campaigns to enhance business outcomes and reduce carbon intensity.

Commenting on the partnership, Kieley Taylor, global head of partnerships at GroupM, said, “In 2023, we set out in partnership with SeenThis to minimise emissions using data from our partners. One year on, we are achieving what we said we would do, building on our global framework for media decarbonization. The success of this partnership marks an important step in our commitment to decarbonise our media supply chain, and the more advertisers opt into SeenThis, the more they can drive positive results across both emissions and performance.” 

Thomas Bowens, global agency director at SeenThis, also said, “Our partnership is one of the first examples of a vendor providing an immediate turn-key solution to enable GroupM to deliver CO2e reductions while enhancing the user experience. We’re thrilled that GroupM is focused on the combination of minimising emissions while maximising performance and is embracing the use of SeenThis data to share this insight with their advertisers to encourage lower carbon cost of business outcomes.”

Thailand – Arçelik Hitachi Home Appliances, the global provider of Hitachi-branded home appliances (excluding Japan), has teamed up with Scope3 to help drive the target reduction and inform lasting changes to Arçelik Hitachi’s digital media strategy.

Arçelik Hitachi is on a mission to reduce the carbon emissions from its digital advertising campaigns by at least 25% over a six-month period. 

In this partnership, Scope3 will work with Arçelik Hitachi’s agency H+ to help reduce emissions in their digital campaigns by removing climate risk inventory (MFA and inventory with high carbon emissions) using Green Media Products (GMP+), which also blocks problematic ad placements by design.

Arçelik Hitachi will leverage Scope3’s granular, dynamic, and comprehensive emissions data model designed to accurately measure the carbon emissions from digital advertising. The model powers Scope3’s suite of reduction solutions for brands, agencies, and publishers, including Green Media Products, Climate Shield, and more.

The optimisation will occur midway through a six-month campaign period to provide a definitive side-by-side comparison of reductions and performance data. It will run from May to December 2024 in four markets: Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

According to Melis Erdinç, head of digital marketing at Arçelik Hitachi Home Appliances, engaging Scope3 to reduce the carbon footprint of its digital advertising activities is the next step in the company’s sustainability journey.

“With our parent company, Arçelik, being recognised by Corporate Knights in its ‘2023 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World’ list, Arçelik Hitachi places sustainability at the core of our business and is always looking at new and innovative ways to help us get to Net Zero by 2050. Last year, when Scope3 expanded its activities in Southeast Asia, we eagerly seized the opportunity to collaborate. Together with Scope3, we are pioneering a greener approach to digital advertising. We’re thrilled to commit to a 25% reduction in the carbon footprint of our digital marketing activity by the end of 2024. I’m proud to say that this partnership reflects our commitment to sustainability and innovation,” Erdinç explained. 

Ben Poole, director at H+, also shared, “We are excited to be affecting sustainable change in the industry through this pioneering partnership. More sustainable media is also better quality and more effective. We are committed to developing a continuous programme of emissions reduction with Scope3, Arçelik Hitachi, and other brands in the region.”

Meanwhile, June Cheung, head of JAPAC at Scope3, said, “We want to help brands and agencies across Southeast Asia increase media efficiency, reduce emissions, and drive industry-wide change, so we are delighted that Arçelik Hitachi has committed to decisive and bold action to reduce the carbon footprint of its digital advertising. We are confident that Scope3’s data and the Green Media Products offered by our partners will be able to drive both the reductions and performance Arçelik Hitachi is seeking, and that their reductions journey will inspire other forward-thinking brands across the region to follow suit.”

Singapore – Collaborative sustainability platform Scope3 today announced a US$20 million Series B funding round led by GV, which will be used to accelerate the development of Scope3’s collaborative sustainability platform (CSP), a first-of-its-kind platform that visualises the massively interconnected ad ecosystem while powering meaningful carbon reduction.

Aside from the CSP development, Scope3 will also be using the GV led funding to grow its global team of advertising, tech, and sustainability experts and further expand its data and measurement capabilities.

Talking about Scope3’s efforts, Brian O’Kelley, co-Founder and CEO of Scope3, expressed that the climate crisis is an urgent and global problem, and that the world’s largest brands, advertisers, and businesses are starting to embrace sustainability as an opportunity that is both good for the planet and the business, making sustainable advertising inevitable. 

“At Scope3, we’re building a business that will serve as the foundation for the next generation of media and advertising. This investment gives us the resources to put decarbonisation tools into the hands of the industry, while attracting the talent needed to build a more sustainable ad ecosystem and deliver on our mission,” he added. 

Speaking on the investment, Kelley concluded, “I’m grateful for the support of GV and our other investors, as well as the many clients, partners, and industry leaders who have helped us get to this point GV’s climate tech focus and extensive knowledge of the nuances of advertising technology make them the perfect fit.”

Meanwhile, Erik Nordlander, general partner at GV, commented, “Scope3’s focus on measurement and reduction takes the right approach to decarbonisation and we’re confident in their ability to move the entire digital ad ecosystem toward climate progress. We are delighted to support their business expansion.”

Notably, Scope3’s additional investors in this round also include Room40 Ventures and Venrock.

New York, USA – Carbon intelligence platform Cedara has announced the launch of its reduction marketplace which enables companies to use innovative third-party solutions to help reduce corporate and supply chain emissions.

As part of the launch, Cedara has partnered with full-service digital marketing agency, Croud, and adaptive streaming technology platform, SeenThis, to empower Pret to reduce carbon emissions across its video ad delivery. 

Croud, known for its industry-leading expertise in digital marketing and advertising, recognised the importance of measuring and reducing the carbon footprint associated with its clients’ advertising campaigns. In pursuit of this objective, Croud worked with Cedara to measure Pret’s media emissions comprehensively. 

By leveraging SeenThis’ integration into Cedara, marketers can easily estimate the impact of switching to SeenThis’ proprietary streaming technology during the planning stage. They can also measure the overall campaign footprint, and quantify avoided emissions after activating SeenThis’ technology, which significantly reduces the data transfer for video creatives compared to running creatives of corresponding quality using conventional technology. 

Luke Smith, founder and CEO of Croud, said, “We are committed to delivering exceptional results for our clients while minimising the environmental impact of our campaigns. Our collaboration with Cedara and SeenThis has allowed us to achieve both objectives. This partnership exemplifies the power of data-driven insights and innovative technology in achieving sustainable advertising practices.”

He added, “We are delighted to provide access to Pret’s emissions related data to help them in their efforts in becoming more sustainable,” says Jesper Benon, CEO of SeenThis. “With the launch of Cedara’s Reduction Marketplace, which measures a company’s overall emissions, this collaboration fits perfectly into that narrative, as creative delivery is an important part of the puzzle when it comes to reaching a net zero objective.”

Meanwhile, David Shaw, CEO of Cedara, commented, “We are proud to partner with leading companies advancing the industry towards Ad Net Zero. This collaboration underscores the importance of data-driven decision-making in the pursuit of environmental sustainability.”

Singapore – Outbrain has announced a strategic partnership with Cedara, an end-to-end carbon intelligence platform, to support Outbrain and its customers’ sustainability and decarbonisation efforts. 

The partnership will allow Outbrain to share in-depth emissions measurements with its advertiser partners, including those running on the company’s newly launched branding platform, ‘Onyx by Outbrain’. It will also enable the company to comprehensively measure carbon emissions across its global organisation. 

Moreover, the company announced the launch of its ‘smart-throttling’ tool – a response prediction model which uses machine learning to predict and recommend the most valuable requests for its demand-side-platform (DSP) partners.

Outbrain will leverage Cedara’s technology to assess its own current baseline, analyse data to identify areas for improvement, and empower advertisers to gain visibility into the emissions derived from their campaigns with Outbrain. The partnership also supports the industry-wide initiative Ad Net Zero, aimed at decarbonising the production, distribution, and publication of advertising. 

Yaron Galai, co-founder and co-CEO of Outbrain, said, “Outbrain is committed to shaping a better and more sustainable digital advertising ecosystem, and our partnership with Cedara combined with our Smart-Throttling tool will give us another avenue to support our premium publisher partners while addressing the need to reduce carbon emissions and ensure advertisers have a transparent way to measure the impact of their campaigns.” 

He added, “Our direct integrations with many of the most prestigious publishers across the globe make us supply-path-optimised by design, and this added layer will enable us to strengthen our focus on sustainability to continue building deeper partnerships with advertisers.”

Meanwhile, David Shaw, CEO & co-founder of Cedara, commented, “Cedara is thrilled to further enable Outbrain’s commitment to sustainability, while supporting their publisher and advertiser partners’ own paths to net zero. We applaud Outbrain’s industry-leading efforts at both an organisational and technological level in decarbonisation.”

Singapore – IT service and consulting firm SeenThis has announced a global partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, with the goal of reducing and avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions from digital advertising.

The collaboration will enable GroupM and its agencies to leverage SeenThis’ expertise and proprietary technology to manage and minimize carbon emissions from creative delivery while improving the performance of display advertising campaigns.

Initially, GroupM’s agencies will use the SeenThis emissions dashboard to measure data transfer and create deeper understanding of campaign emissions; ultimately, the data will be integrated directly into GroupM’s tools to enable the planning of display campaigns.

GroupM and SeenThis will also align methodologies on the carbon cost of data transfer, incorporating these into GroupM’s own carbon calculator for use in planning and post-campaign analysis. This will enable GroupM’s agencies to refine and provide more detailed supply-chain decisioning for data transfer within digital channels.

Ed Fanning, global head of partnerships, advertising and retail technology at Group M, commented, “As the world’s leading media investment company, the team at GroupM is on a mission to develop tools and technologies which ensure that carbon emissions are considered a part of the media planning process. This partnership builds on the global framework for media decarbonization we announced in 2022 and is an important step in our commitment to decarbonize our media supply chain.”

Jesper Benon, CEO at SeenThis, also said, “We are excited to extend the benefits of  the SeenThis solution to new and existing GroupM clients, as our proprietary streaming addresses the trade-off that otherwise exists between performance and sustainability in the digital ecosystem. GroupM agencies are able to increase performance while minimizing carbon emissions, and at the same time helping drive attention and unlock creative capabilities. We deliver lightning-fast ad-loading that attains higher attention from users, which translates into fewer wasted impressions and a more efficient use of resources.”

Meanwhile, Thomas Houge, CCO at SeenThis, adds, “We are honored to partner with GroupM globally as it further enhances its commitment to minimizing the carbon impact of digital media campaigns. Knowing that WPP´s clients need to drive towards a more sustainable business through their marketing, we are thrilled to offer our technology to drive sustainability and sustainable business results all in one.”