Digital advertising plays a vital role in the modern economy, connecting businesses with audiences worldwide. However, this connection comes with an environmental cost - from the energy consumed by ad servers to the computational resources required for real-time bidding. As our industry continues to grow, so does our responsibility to address its environmental impact.
Sustainability in advertising technology isn’t just about reducing carbon emissions - it’s about creating more efficient systems that benefit both the environment and business operations. This involves examining everything from how we handle bid requests to how we optimize our server infrastructure. While the challenges are complex, they also present opportunities for innovation and collaboration across the digital advertising ecosystem.
In the absence of standardized sustainability metrics and protocols, conducting transactions through OpenRTB and similar programmatic systems presents significant challenges. The decentralized nature of programmatic advertising, where multiple parties interact through complex bid streams, makes it particularly difficult to track, measure, and optimize for environmental impact. Currently, there exists no industry standard definition of sustainability.
This lack of standards means each participant in the supply chain - from publishers to SSPs, DSPs, and advertisers - defines and measures sustainability differently. This fragmentation creates obstacles when attempting to make informed decisions about sustainable advertising practices. For instance, one platform might focus on reducing server calls, while another prioritizes energy-efficient data centers, making it challenging to compare and evaluate partners effectively.
The current OpenRTB specification, while robust for traditional trading parameters, lacks standardized fields or mechanisms for communicating sustainability-related information between parties. This absence of common sustainability signals means that even environmentally conscious organizations struggle to automate and scale their green advertising initiatives within existing programmatic frameworks.
As the digital advertising industry evolves toward more transparent and eco-friendly practices, we expect buying platforms to adopt various methodologies that will continue to evolve. In this context, Prebid.org is positioned to play an essential role in supporting the ecosystem’s transition to more sustainable practices. Initially, our focus is on providing comprehensive documentation and guidance to help organizations navigate and implement emerging sustainability approaches.
This educational and supportive role will naturally evolve as industry standards take shape. When concrete sustainability standards emerge, Prebid.org will expand its involvement to include developing and maintaining specific technical implementations, adapting its open-source solutions to support standardized sustainability measures across the programmatic landscape.
To begin this journey, we’re proud to introduce the Prebid.org Sustainability Portal. This resource serves as a crucial first step - a central hub where members of the advertising ecosystem can access information about configuration best practices, monitoring approaches, and optimization techniques. The portal is designed to help organizations start taking meaningful action today while preparing for the standardized sustainability frameworks of tomorrow.
The Sustainability Portal represents our commitment to supporting the ecosystem’s environmental initiatives, providing practical guidance that organizations can implement now, while remaining flexible enough to adapt as industry standards develop and mature.