Real examples and research-backed practices for eco-friendly advertising

Sustainability isn’t just product's problem — it’s also advertisers’.

And the impact of advertising on the planet is often massively underestimated. Right now, the ad industry contributes over 215,000 metric tons of carbon emissions every month across its core markets including the US, UK, Germany and France.  

While many companies focus their eco-conscious efforts on creating sustainable products, marketing your products in sustainable ways and promoting the sustainability of your products in your ads is every bit as an important part of being a sustainably responsible business. 

In this post, I’ll cover advertising sustainability in depth. I’ll also explore sustainable advertising best practices and examples from green-friendly brands. 

When you think about your corporate carbon footprint, you may think about recycling systems or going with a green energy supplier for the office, but the kinds of ads you choose can have a huge impact on your carbon footprint.

A single ad campaign can create around 70 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions. 

“A single ad campaign generates 70 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions: The same as what seven people on average release into the atmosphere in a year.”

- Moeve Global

And digital advertising is the biggest offender, with digital contributing the most to the wider digital sector's sizable carbon emissions, contributing around 2-4% of total global emissions. 

Where do these carbon emissions come from? In digital advertising, they come from the systems and servers we use to create ads. In particular, the data centers used to power all kinds of digital ads create a worrying amount of carbon emissions — currently accounting for 2.5% of all global CO2 emissions, that’s more emissions created by the entire aviation industry at 2.1%.  

Beyond directly contributing to carbon emissions, the advertising industry indirectly contributes to global warming by promoting consumerism that impacts the planet. 

New Weather Institute think tank and Greenpeace found that the greenhouse emissions connected to car and flight advertisements worldwide are equivalent to two times the carbon emissions emitted by Spain every year.

Physical advertisements, like billboards, also contribute to carbon emissions as these ads and their materials need to be produced and transported.

You might be surprised by how much of an environmental impact advertising makes, but there are several best practices you can use to help mitigate your impact. 

"The industry standards should be easy to implement and yield visible results across the entire supply chain, not just the demand side. However, implementation should be encouraged but not directly enforced. Ultimately, sustainability must be viewed as a collective effort that benefits everyone, and the absence of established industry standards should not prevent us from taking action now. We can all begin by examining our own operations and identify areas where we can already save resources." — Gloria Eichler, CPO at smartclip.

Here are some sustainable advertising best practices you can use to reduce your carbon footprint. 

1. Set sustainability goals 

The foundation of your sustainable advertising strategy should be a set of clear goals. Creating clear goals and tying them to specific metrics can help provide a solid basis for your brand’s advertising. 

Setting goals also begins with having an understanding of your current advertising carbon footprint. To build out your goals, you’ll first need to audit your current impact and analyze how your ads, ad strategies and aAd tTech stack are impacting your business’ carbon footprint. 

Lori Goode, CMO at Index Exchange, notes that even if you don’t have a way to measure your exact emissions, you can focus your analysis on areas that you’ve identified tend to drive the highest emissions such as creative production and media buying. 

2. Appoint the right people

Making a commitment to sustainable advertising means making sure you have the right team in place to support your efforts. 

You can appoint someone to monitor both the ongoing environmental impact of your advertising, sustainable trends within the wider advertising industry, science-based target guidelines, as well as updates issued by governing bodies. 

3. Stay up-to-date with regulations 

One of the most important things you can do if you’re working in advertising is to keep up to date with the current rules and regulations. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Green Guides is a great resource that covers detailed advice on how to present your sustainability claims. 

4. Choose low-carbon ad platforms 

Data centers are one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions. You can help reduce your impact by prioritizing working with advertising networks that focus on using renewable energy for their data centers and media delivery. 

Platforms like Equativ use GreenPMPs (Programmatic Media Placement) to help advertisers reduce their carbon footprints. You can use the platform to automatically identify and remove sites and placements with the highest carbon emissions. 

5. Use low-impact ad formats 

You can also reduce your environmental impact by choosing low-impact ad formats. Examples of low-impact ads include static banners and text-based ads rather than video ads. 

51toCarbonZero explains: "Every time an ad is displayed online, it involves a complex network of servers, data centres, and user devices, all-consuming energy. The larger the ad file, the more energy is required to serve it, directly contributing to carbon emissions. By reducing the file size of your ads, you can decrease the amount of data that needs to be transferred, thereby lowering the carbon emissions associated with each ad impression." 

6. Choose eco-friendly tools and providers 

If you want to reduce the environmental impact of your advertising, it’s important to look at the ad tech tools in your stack. 

To assess your tools, you can review markers such as carbon footprint and energy efficiency alongside any green certifications. 

To help verify whether your providers are dedicated to eco-friendly practices, look for certificates like: 

1. Rainforest Alliance: This certification recognizes a company’s dedication to the three pillars of sustainability: environmental conservation, social fairness and economic sustainability. 

2. ENERGY STAR: This certification assesses a company’s energy efficiency and ranks them as more energy efficient than 75% of similar businesses.  

3. B Corps: SMEs use this certification to show their dedicated efforts to making a positive social and environmental impact. 

"Companies that score more than 80 points (out of 200) are officially certified, and to maintain such status, they must be recertified every three years. To add some color, Patagonia, the mothership B Corp, has 151.5 points, while Ben & Jerry’s has 110, and WeTransfer comes in at 80.4. With a score of 92.1, we’re confident we’re on the right track, but we also see significant room for improvement to build a more progressive, responsible and sustainable business," shared Steve Phillips, Co-Founder, Executive Chair and Chief Innovation Officer at Zappi, discussing Zappi’s move towards becoming a greater “force for good,” with our B Corp status. 

Did you know we officially became a B Corp in 2022? Read all about it here. 

7. Identify immediate areas for improvement 

Combine uncovering areas that allow you to make a quick, immediate difference alongside initiatives that can help you reach your goals long term. For example, AdGreen found that travel and transport, followed by accommodation and film studios, contributed the most to carbon emissions. 

Look at easy ways you can reduce carbon emissions and find sustainable alternatives in these essential areas alongside production companies. Goode notes some quick wins including reducing the number of production crew you’re traveling with and opting for a local film studio. 

8. Incorporate carbon calculators

To help reduce your carbon footprint, you can pre-calculate the environmental impact of your ads and advertising strategies. If you’re building an ad campaign, you can use carbon footprint calculators such as AdGreen’s carbon calculator to measure the environmental impact of every aspect of your advertising project. 

You can use the platform to help calculate your high carbon items and compare different production methods. For example, say you’re shooting a TV commercial — you can calculate nearly every single aspect of your project including travel, accommodation, shooting spaces and production and development.  

Google also offers an emissions calculator for Google ads, allowing you to track the impact of your online ad campaigns. For example, Google calculates ad impressions, screen type, device type, data storage and more. 

9. Carbon offsetting 

One of the best ways you can help reduce the environmental impact of your ads is with carbon offsetting. With this approach, you buy carbon credits to financially support projects that cut or capture carbon emissions elsewhere to help offset the carbon emissions generated by your company’s activities. These projects typically include energy initiates, energy efficiency programs and reforestation efforts. 

However, as The Drum reports, relying on carbon offsetting to help hit net zero targets can quickly lead to greenwashing — undermining consumer’ trust and leading to potential legal complications. 

Professor Gregory Trencher, an energy-policy expert at Kyoto University highlights how the practice can easily veer into greenwashing. He says:

“The fundamental definition of greenwashing refers to a situation when the climate benefits that are claimed by a particular company don’t match the reality. And I think we see a very clear trend with certain companies, looking at their offsetting practices, if we look at the kind of benefits that are claimed by these particular projects.”

To avoid greenwashing, avoid implying or outright stating that your products or business practices are more sustainable than they really are — don’t claim carbon neutrality because of offsets alone.  

10. Reduce, reuse, recycle  

While many ads and campaigns require original materials, you can help cut your carbon footprint by reducing, reusing and recycling your ad content — from audio to images. The 3R approach is foundational to all sustainability — just imagine how easily the concept can be applied to packaging.

You can use a range of strategies to reduce, such as limiting autoplay ads and focusing on creating shorter ads. 

But when it comes to reusing and recycling, how do you know which content assets are most effective? Which resonates best with your audience? And which pieces of content should you choose to reuse and recycle in your next ad or campaign? 

You can use Zappi to test a range of advertising projects including TV ads, digital videos across social media, offline images and concepts. You can even test the creative effectiveness of different ads and ad elements with your audience — ranking aspects like emotional in tensity, brand recall and distinctiveness. 

As a connected advertising insights platform, you can track the performance of different ads and campaigns over time — giving you a centralized database of insights into your top-performing ad content and allowing you to quickly identify the best ad content to reuse and recycle. 

Find out which other AI ad testing tools could be a great accompaniment to your ad tech stack in our past post. 

11. Create ads that make a positive impact 

Making a commitment to greener ads also means supporting sustainability in your advertising itself. To promote sustainability in your advertising, it’s essential to get clear on what your brand’s sustainable values are. 

Which environmental issues do you care about most and want to be known for addressing? For example, do you care about protecting natural habitats, ecosystems and wildlife? Do you want to support consumers to live greener lives that reduce their carbon footprints? Do you care about reducing the impact of fast fashion and promoting keeping and thrifting clothes?

Fashion retailer H&M is known for its commitment to recycling and repurposing clothing and materials and regularly promotes these values in their ads.

The H&M Group says: "Traditionally, fashion has followed a linear business model – take, make, waste. CBMs break this chain to keep garments in use for longer through care and repair services and by increasing the number of users through resell and rental. Once they have come to the end of their useful lifespan, collection schemes make sure they are not wasted and help maximize the value of the resources that went into making them."

Read on for some of the best sustainable advertising examples — from Ben & Jerry’s to Patagonia. 

Patagonia: Don’t Buy This Jacket 

Patagonia's “Don’t Buy This Jacket,” campaign is one of the best examples of sustainability in advertising. 

In the run up to Christmas, when most brands are encouraging consumers to buy more and not less, the sustainable clothing brand differentiated itself from competitors, emphasized the quality and longevity of its organic cotton, and talked up its sustainable values by encouraging consumers not to buy a new jacket from the brand during the holiday season.

The band's European marketing director Jonathan Petty says: “Our customers expect very high quality and that’s why they always come back to us. At the same time we help consumers change their behaviour for the better by encouraging them to make more considered purchases.”

The brand encourages consumers to reduce their carbon footprint by signing up to ‘The Common Threads Initiative’, a scheme set up by Patagonia that encourages people to keep what’s already in their wardrobes, repair what breaks or recycle.

Petty continues: “We’re at the opposite spectrum of big brand disposable fashion. We’re about making great quality products that are designed to last, so we have a lifetime warranty on our products.”

Kia: Hero’s Journey

Kia’s popular Superbowl ad, “Hero’s Journey,” is a great example of how you can use humor. In this brilliant ad, Melissa McCarthy goes on a series of heroic sustainability missions — from trying to stop the ice caps from melting to “saving the rhinos.” 

The comical scenarios show Melissa struggling through each climate-related challenge, clinging to a fallen, just-chopped tree to getting flung into a boat by an endangered whale. The background track features Bonnie Tyler’s, “I Need a Hero.”  

As Jonny White at Campaign Live says some of the most effective marketing campaigns help consumers find the “fun” in sustainability, quipping, “If we don’t laugh then we’ll cry.”  

Marketa Benisek at Wholegrain Digital says: 

"[In the words of] George Orwell, 'Every joke is a tiny revolution.' Humour is a unique – and rather unusual – communication tool that breaks all sorts of barriers. It has the power to reduce the pressure of difficult topics, to emotionally engage people, and to get them to think critically about topics that they may otherwise ignore. When we apply humour to climate change – which is inherently linked to sustainability – we can make the topic more approachable and digestible."

Find out more about the power of emotions in advertising in our past post. 

Ben and Jerry’s: Flavors We Could Lose to Climate Change  

Ben and Jerry’s continue to bring their signature playful, witty voice to all their sustainability initiatives. Check out the opening text to their climate statement on their website: 

"We prefer our ice cream like our polar ice caps: Unmelted. Unfortunately, though, the climate crisis has other plans. It’s already disrupting our planet and our lives in dramatic ways—and if we don’t act now, we might even lose some of our favorite ingredients, like cocoa, vanilla, and coffee! That’s why we’re working to make sure that we’re doing our fair share to avert the climate crisis.

At Ben & Jerry’s, we believe that we can cut greenhouse gas emissions from dairy by more than half over the next decade, while at the same time helping our farmers adopt agricultural practices that will help make their cows more healthy, their soil more productive, and our planet more resilient."

And take this brilliant ad on YouTube, which opens with the line: “Not to be dramatic, but climate change is coming for your favorite ice cream flavors.” They then hit viewers with some hard stats, including the fact that 90% of the land used to grow coca could become completely unusable by 2050.

Whether you knew it or not, the ad industry contributes substantially to the world’s carbon emissions. As a responsible marketer, there are several things you can do to cut your carbon footprint — from choosing low-impact ads to offsetting your carbon emissions with green projects elsewhere.