Managing carbon emissions from marketing

If there's one thing advertising is good at, it's persuading consumers to consume. However, this wastes a huge amount of energy and creates millions of tons of carbon emissions. This is especially true for digital programmatic ads. To serve a digital ad, data must travel between servers, from the advertiser to the ad exchange and to the owner's inventory to reach the audience, consuming energy and producing carbon emissions during each step of the process.

Then the entire ecosystem of advertisers, ad platforms and other collected data sends it to their data warehouses for storage and analysis, more energy is consumed, leading to even higher carbon emissions. Since these servers are mostly located in data centers, that is where the biggest impact occurs. As more computing power is required for AI becoming part of the ad ecosystem, emissions will grow faster and faster. (More on www.latimes.com)