Scope3: Reducing Carbon Footprint in Digital Supply Chains

As the digital advertising sector faces growing demands to mitigate its environmental impact, sustainability has become a critical focus for industry leaders.

Anne Coghlan, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Scope3, is at the forefront of helping brands assess, report and mitigate the carbon emissions within digital media supply chains.

In her capacity, Anne oversees key business operations including commercial strategies, product innovation and workforce management.

here, she provides her perspective on sustainable marketing in an interview with Supply Chain Digital. 

Please introduce Scope3

In 2022, I had a vision along with Brian O’Kelley and Mike Freyberger to deliver safe and sustainable growth within digital advertising, so Scope3 was born. 

We help brands measure and report back on their campaign emissions and decarbonise the digital media supply chain while helping make campaigns more effective.

One of Scope3’s core beliefs is that having sustainability as a core business practice will positively lead to economic growth not only for individual businesses but for the wider digital advertising ecosystem as well. 

Talk me through the founding of Scope3 – how did it come about? And what challenges did you face?

Scope3’s mission is focused on spotlighting and addressing, complex, wasteful supply chains that drive significant financial losses for brands, and at the same time, harm the environment. 

Legacy adtech infrastructure is bloated and inefficient. The ecosystem has grown without taking issues like energy consumption or sustainability into consideration, so as new solutions have become available, like point solutions that solve for specific challenges, we have been left with an industry that is convoluted and does not perform effectively.                                       

When you think that the internet is largely funded by advertising, it should come as no surprise that streaming and display ads generate an average of 7.2 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year. This volume of emissions is inexcusable and impacts all parties across the supply chain. It’s a pressing challenge but one that is solvable, and we are helping brands, agencies and publishers to bring this number down. 

Why has the issue of the high emissions created by the advertising industry recently come to the surface?

It may have only recently come to the surface, but the issue has been bubbling away for some time now. Over the last three years, we’ve been working with the industry to own the data science and expose the connection between digital advertising campaigns, waste and high emissions. Awareness has been improving and so with AI’s rapid growth, attention has now turned to how it could exacerbate existing issues. 

We know that AI is ‘thirsty’ – it uses a lot of energy and water to cool data centres, while server farms that power its applications are very carbon-intensive. There’s also a risk that AI compounds campaign waste, rather delivering meaningful change. With that understanding, we are now having conversations with our customers and prospects to ensure AI doesn’t evolve unchecked, otherwise it could come at a cost to both business performance and the planet.

What benefits are marketers and advertisers seeing when they incorporate sustainable practices into their strategy?

Brands often start working with us because they realise that incorporating sustainable practices into their media buying is the right thing to do. It’s better for the planet and helps them achieve their net zero goals. 

But they continue to partner with us because the performance benefits are also apparent. In ANA’s recent playbook, created in partnership with Scope3, brands including Coca-Cola and Mars reported seeing a reduction in their emissions by up to 36% and improved marketing outcomes once they implemented sustainability practices into their media buying strategies.

As awareness of the correlation between sustainability and performance has grown, we find that businesses see our solutions as a means of growth and resilience. There is now an acceleration towards sustainable practices which is cutting campaign waste, driving better returns, and helping the planet - a win-win for marketers and advertisers.

Scope3 secured US$25m funding for expansion into Sustainable AI in October 2024 - how will you tackle the emissions caused by AI within advertising?

It’s about enabling action through measurement. We want to ensure that, both internally and externally, we’re helping the industry make better decisions about which model and provider to use as they incorporate AI into their advertising. 

AI is going to disrupt how our industry runs, but it must be adopted responsibly – and we have an important role to play in educating marketers and advertisers on how it can be used to drive safe and sustainable long-term brand impact. 

It’s almost impossible to predict the speed of innovation and the unintended consequences. AI is developing fast and has the potential to reimagine how the digital advertising ecosystem operates – but this could lead to a dramatic rise in emissions too. 

We know that it carries an environmental tax, so we need to be thinking long-term about how to make its applications sustainable-by-design. It’s our responsibility to ensure that AI innovation across the industry considers both business performance and protecting the planet.

What’s one takeaway you’d like our readers to grasp?

Contrary to common belief, it’s not a case of sacrificing commercial and economic gains, for morally driven business practices. 

They are not mutually exclusive goals. 

Marketers and advertisers should embrace sustainable practices as a growth driver.

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