Italian chapter of the Interactive Advertising Bureau publishes a white paper on digital sustainability, focusing on carbon emissions
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, sustainability has become a pressing concern. A white paper published by IAB Italia on September 9, 2025, offers Italian advertisers strategies to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of their digital marketing campaigns.
The document details a three-pillar approach for addressing digital marketing sustainability: measurement, reduction, and optimization. Advertisers should begin with measurement infrastructure establishment before pursuing optimization strategies.
Frequency capping is a crucial practice in this approach. It prevents excessive message repetition to individual users, reducing redundant network traffic and improving brand perception. Advertisers should also establish creative guidelines that specify maximum file sizes, preferred compression formats, and duration limits for video content.
Viewability filtering is another essential practice. It ensures advertisements reach users who can actually see the content, eliminating waste associated with non-visible impressions. Efficient targeting reduces advertising waste and minimizes environmental impact by decreasing impression volumes.
Advertisers should audit their current programmatic supply chains to identify redundant intermediaries that increase both costs and carbon dioxide emissions. The choice of digital marketing technology platforms significantly influences campaign environmental impact through infrastructure efficiency and supply chain optimization. Advertisers should evaluate platform partners based on their sustainability commitments, measurement capabilities, and operational efficiency alongside traditional performance metrics.
Digital marketing campaigns generate emissions through multiple stages of their lifecycle, including creative production, technological infrastructure, data transmission, and end-user device consumption. Ineffective targeting leads to enormous advertising waste by serving irrelevant messages to uninterested audiences, increasing network requests and energy consumption without generating business value.
"Made for Advertising" websites and ad-cluttered domains are significant sources of inefficient emissions. Advertisers should implement updated blacklists and collaborate with brand safety providers to exclude this inventory from their campaigns. Invalid traffic filtering represents another critical optimization area, as fraudulent impressions consume energy without providing any advertising value.
The white paper references the Global Media Sustainability Framework launched in June 2024 by Ad Net Zero and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. It also provides specific recommendations for everyday digital marketing practices to reduce environmental impact, such as the adoption of interoperable identity solutions to reduce energy consumption associated with cookie synchronization processes.
Several European providers offer carbon emission measurement services for digital marketing campaigns, including Scope3, Good-Loop, IMPACT+, Cedara, DK, and consultancy firms like EY denkstatt that provide comprehensive sustainability services. The internet alone consumes 10% of global electricity and pollutes six times more than it did a decade ago. Digital marketing technologies account for between 8% and 10% of energy consumption across the European Union.
The white paper outlines practical approaches for companies to address sustainability challenges in their digital marketing operations, with a focus on the environmental impact of digital marketing. By implementing these strategies, advertisers can not only reduce their carbon dioxide footprint but also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns.
