Why is a creative like a bicycle?
For the past three months, I've been sort of obsessed with trying to model the carbon footprint of a creative. Like so many obsessions it started with a simple idea: we should treat native creatives differently than third-party-served creatives. One thing led to another and pretty soon I was reading technical specs for video compression and streaming formats. (Side note: kudos to the Pinterest engineering team for this deep dive into how they optimize video for user experience!)
What I came up with, with much help from Emma Etherington, Benjamin Davy, and many others, is a model that splits the rendered creative into four parts:
The placement or "ad hole" as Jason Spero calls it, which I can't stop saying and laughing at
The ad format or scaffolding for creative assets
The creative, effectively a manifest of assets, trackers, and other bits and pieces
The assets themselves
After many iterations, this representation solves for many of the complexities across channels and helps provide reasonable defaults when we don't have all of the exact details (for instance, when estimating carbon prior to selecting an ad format or building a creative).
Along this process, I realized that while we had documented our thinking about methodology, there was no single place you could go to see all of our calculations. So I tried to write out all of the equations, and asked the Scope3 engineering team to see how they compared with what we actually do in production. After a couple of weeks of back and forth, we're pretty close, with a few tweaks that would cause numbers to change in production that need some customer notification (for instance, switching to blended, country-specific device type defaults). I am so excited about this because it means that any other sustainability provider should be able to get the same exact numbers as we do. This was the whole point of open sourcing our framework, and I'm still looking for a good home (ie with governance and financial resources) to continue and expand this effort... a prebid.org for sustainability measurement if you will. Ping me if you're interested in collaborating on that!
Finally, I did a little whiteboard session to walk through the process. I tried to make this accessible so that you don't have to be an ad tech or sustainability nerd to follow along, but this is BOKonAds so who knows if I pulled it off!