22 July 2025

Clean pipes, high performance: Why media quality is the next sustainability lever

In summary

• Media quality isn’t just a performance lever, it’s a sustainability engine.
• From cloud pipelines to bidstream hygiene, every clean cut in your ad tech stack reduces energy usage, carbon emissions, and operational waste.
• With Scope3 pivoting away from carbon counting and Good-Loop shifting toward broader responsibility, one message is clear: bad media is bad for the planet.

Bad media is bad for the planet

Poor-quality media isn’t just a performance problem…it’s an environmental one.

Every bloated bidstream, shady impression, and inefficient delivery path chews through compute power, racks up emissions, and delivers diminishing returns.

That’s why Scope3 hit reset, moving away from carbon tracking to focus on a deeper truth: measuring emissions is really about measuring quality.

Redundant auctions, bad inventory, and noisy supply chains? High carbon. Clean, premium, well-structured media? Low carbon.

Good-Loop is following suit, shifting focus from offsets to upstream reduction. The message is clear. Sustainability in ad tech starts before the bid is made, not after the damage is done.

The adtech inefficiencies driving emissions

For those deep in the DSP/SSP trenches, the carbon cost is buried in the everyday stack.
Consider:

• Auction duplication across SSPs leading to unnecessary compute load

• Header bidding bloat inflating the bidstream

• Over-tagging and non-optimised creative files adding latency (and server strain)

• Invalid traffic (IVT) cycling through media pipes for no reason

• Over-reliance on low-quality long-tail inventory with high emissions per impression

Every redundant call, every unviewable impression, every pixel that doesn’t need to load, burns energy. And no, it’s not just a “green” issue. It’s a budget issue. It’s a performance issue.

Smarter supply chains start with quality

While based in Europe, the ECOFLOW initiative is setting a global benchmark, and it’s packed with lessons Australian media and adtech teams can act on right now.

Their early tests reveal how optimised delivery pipelines, whether for streaming video or programmatic media, can significantly reduce environmental impact:

• Bitrate tuning and audio fallback modes = major drops in energy consumption

• Cloud-native delivery = better compute efficiency, powered by renewables

• Server-side orchestration = fewer idle machines, less bloat, lower emissions

These aren’t future ideas, they’re operational today. And while no Australian players are involved in ECOFLOW yet, the blueprint is open, public, and ready to be adopted locally.

The same logic applies in programmatic: Why run 10 redundant auctions when one clean path will do?

Tighter pipes, smarter routing, and high-quality inventory not only perform better, they pollute less. It’s why curation is gaining traction as a smarter way to reduce waste and elevate media quality as we explore in this piece.

The performance upside of cleaner buying

Investing in media quality isn’t just an ESG move. It improves outcomes:

• Higher viewability = fewer wasted impressions

• Less bidstream bloat = faster load times and better UX

• Verified premium inventory = lower fraud, better attention

• Optimised creatives = faster rendering, higher completion rates

• Cleaner supply paths = measurable carbon and cost savings

And we’re starting to see this shift take hold closer to home. In out-of-home media, JCDecaux partnered with Scope3 to track and report carbon emissions across its digital campaigns, the first move of its kind in the Australian market. Public broadcasters are also stepping up, with SBS embedding sustainability into its production workflows using the albert toolkit and committing to net-zero by 2045.

Beyond media owners, platforms like FairSupply are giving Australian organisations greater visibility into ESG risks across their broader supply chains, including digital media and ad tech vendors. These aren’t just reporting tools; they’re unlocking smarter, cleaner decision-making across the campaign lifecycle.

Checklist for cleaner ad buying

Want to reduce energy use in your next campaign? Start here:

• Use carbon intelligence tools like Scope3, Cedara or IMPACT+
• Cut auction duplication with strong SPO (supply path optimisation) — here’s how to spot the clean paths from the shady ones
• Audit your supply sources at an exchange and site level
• Compress creatives and reduce JavaScript tag load
• Prioritise premium publishers and attention-based buys
• Measure your emissions per impression and publisher (yes, it’s trackable)

Louder’s recommendation

• Find your sweet spot - purpose built media marketplace are a great place start buying cleaner and reduce wastage
• Bridge the gap in the supply chain and start fostering exchange (SS) relationships
• Develop emissions benchmarks per format and publisher, create a new standard

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