Sustainable Media Planning: How Minor Changes Can Save Massive Amounts of CO₂

Online media deserves special attention in this context. Because they work in the performance sector, where they achieve achievements that other media are hardly capable of. Replacement or exchange of media would often be the wrong approach here. There is a much better alternative here: giving up. Avoid unnecessary programmatic, energy-intensive bidding processes. Ströer has developed a solution for this that anticipates the result of bids and thus makes a large proportion of them unnecessary.

There are also sufficient opportunities to forensically document the digital delivery of advertising material to bots and – as the sources are known – to forego these deliveries. Depending on the campaign, this can amount to ten to 40 percent of the media budget and thus of CO₂ emissions. The same applies if three quarters of the clicks on Tiktok videos are carried out by bots (source: fraud0). Continuing to finance this advertising without comment is hardly responsible, not only from a sustainability perspective.

So if online advertising is about avoiding unnecessary deliveries and emissions without losing a trace of advertising impact, it also means saving budget resources or freeing them up for media that further increase the advertising impact of the campaign.

There can hardly be better news for CMOs and CFOs for the 2024 campaign year.

A few examples illustrate the opportunities that sustainability initiatives create for marketing and media. A Munich agency cut a little TV, print and online video for a customer (target group 20-59 year olds) and included DOOH in the new media plan. As a result, the weekly reach increased by six percent, all observed advertising effectiveness KPIs remained at a high level of increase – but CO₂ emissions fell by 28 percent.

A young company that is looking to build reach and awareness also added DOOH to its media mix. This increased reach by 23 percentage points and awareness by 19 percent. If the same advertising pressure and the same increase in performance had been generated via TV and online, CO₂ emissions would have increased by 372 tons.

Skoda foregone some of its OOH, TV, print and online video investments and instead increased the proportion of social media and display. The result was a 17 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions. Losses in advertising effectiveness and media efficiency: zero.

A software company’s media efficiency increases by 24 percent after cutting search, print and TV and increasing display and DOOH. In the same breath, around 350 tons of CO₂ are saved.

A telecommunications provider shifted just seven percent of its TV and print budgets in favor of OOH and DOOH and not only achieved 13 percent more target group contacts, but also reduced CO₂ emissions by eleven percent – which amounts to more than 1,500 tons of CO₂ per year.

For the McDonald’s “Plastic kicks the bucket” campaign, OMD shortened the online and social spot lengths, used recycled paper in print and added more DOOH to the media mix. The result: brand likeability +22 percent, trustworthiness +15 percent – but minus 3.5 tons of CO₂.

These six examples show that even minor changes to the media mix are enough to save large amounts of CO₂. And that media plans also gain from these changes: an increase in reach and often also an increase in media and business KPIs. As a responsible decision-maker, you couldn’t ask for more for more sustainable media planning.

To remind you: every major TV campaign releases an average of around 500 tons of CO₂ into the air. Every average online campaign emits 70 tons of CO₂. According to OMG Momentum, each individual media campaign emits an average of 5.4 tons of CO₂.

We are in the middle of the planning phase for 2024. Now is the time to intervene in the media mix and make every media presence of every brand more sustainable. It is best not to have an appointment between the customer and the agency that does not involve sustainable media. The environment will thank us for it.

About the author: Thomas Koch is an icon of the media industry. Agency boss, author, blogger, columnist and keynote speaker. He knows everything and everyone in the media industry.