IAB Italia releases digital sustainability white paper addressing carbon emissions

IAB Italia published a comprehensive white paper on digital sustainability on September 9, 2025, providing Italian advertisers with concrete strategies to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of their digital advertising campaigns. The 57-page document focuses specifically on the environmental impact of digital advertising and outlines practical approaches for companies to address sustainability challenges in their marketing operations.

According to the white paper, internet alone consumes 10% of global electricity and pollutes six times more than it did a decade ago. The document emphasizes that digital technologies account for between 8% and 10% of energy consumption across the European Union. Research cited in the paper indicates that digital technology emissions comprised 2% of global CO₂ emissions in 2008, rising to 3.7% by 2020, with projections reaching 8.5% by 2025.

The white paper presents a three-pillar approach for addressing digital advertising sustainability: measurement, reduction and optimization. Companies must first establish accurate measurement systems to understand their environmental impact before implementing targeted reduction strategies. The document explains that accurate measurement enables organizations to identify high-emission areas, establish realistic reduction targets, monitor progress and communicate transparently with stakeholders.

Italian companies have begun implementing sustainability initiatives in recent years, though digital advertising and communication were not initially prioritized as key action areas. The paper notes that awareness of the digital advertising industry's role in global CO₂ emission reduction has grown significantly, leading industry players to consider sustainability as one of their primary challenges.

The document details specific practices for both sell-side and buy-side stakeholders. Publishers and supply-side platforms can implement Global Placement Identifiers to track advertising positions throughout the digital supply chain, avoiding redundant impression processing and reducing environmental impact. The paper also recommends adopting "lazy load" techniques that allow web pages to load only visible elements, reducing CPU usage and CO₂ emissions.

For advertisers and demand-side platforms, the white paper suggests avoiding "Made for Advertising" websites, which create content solely for monetization through advertising. These sites often generate artificial traffic and inefficient impressions with low engagement rates. The document also recommends optimizing supply path efficiency by working with fewer strategic partners to maximize performance while improving sustainability.

According to IAB Italia, several European providers offer carbon emission measurement services for digital advertising campaigns. These include Scope3, Good-Loop, IMPACT+, Cedara and DK. The paper notes that major media agencies including WPP Media, Dentsu and OMG have developed frameworks for measuring carbon emissions from their campaigns.

The white paper references the Global Media Sustainability Framework launched in June 2024 by Ad Net Zero and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. This framework provides industry-standard approaches for calculating greenhouse gas emissions across media campaigns, addressing previous inconsistencies in measurement methodologies that hindered sector-wide progress.

The document presents a case study involving PHD Italia and IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige, which achieved 79% viewability rates on 15-second video pre-roll campaigns while compensating 3 tons of CO₂ emissions. This collaboration utilized Index Green Media Deals to reduce campaign environmental impact while maintaining performance standards.

Digital advertising campaigns generate emissions through multiple stages of their lifecycle, including creative production, technological infrastructure, data transmission and end-user device consumption. The paper explains that factors such as content weight, technological infrastructure complexity, data center energy efficiency and media channel selection significantly influence environmental impact levels.

The white paper provides specific recommendations for everyday digital practices to reduce environmental impact. These include organizing video conferences only when necessary, disabling cameras during calls to reduce environmental impact by up to 96%, closing unused browser tabs and optimizing device energy consumption through efficient power management.

IAB Italia organized a webinar on September 24, 2025, featuring Digital ADV Sustainability Working Group participants to explore solutions for reducing sector emissions. The event addressed companies seeking to lead change toward more sustainable, responsible and innovative digital practices.

The document emphasizes that measurement represents the fundamental first step toward achieving digital sustainability. Available solutions enable companies to understand, monitor and reduce their environmental impact while contributing to a more responsible digital future. The paper concludes that Italian market adoption of these measurement solutions has begun, though greater clarity in service offerings and applicable standards remains necessary.

Recommendations for Advertisers

Based on the IAB Italia white paper analysis and current industry developments, advertisers should implement a systematic approach to digital sustainability that balances environmental responsibility with campaign performance objectives.

Immediate Implementation Steps

Advertisers should begin with measurement infrastructure establishment before pursuing optimization strategies. According to the white paper, companies must first understand their current environmental impact through accurate carbon footprint assessment tools. The document recommends selecting measurement providers capable of delivering consistent methodologies across multiple campaign cycles, as inconsistent measurement approaches prevent meaningful year-over-year comparisons.

The assessment phase should quantify CO₂ emissions generated by digital campaigns to establish internal benchmarks. This baseline measurement becomes essential for subsequent optimization efforts, particularly given the absence of standardized industry benchmarks. Companies should document emission levels across different campaign elements including creative formats, device types, media channels and publisher partnerships.

Supply Chain Optimization Strategies

The white paper emphasizes supply path optimization as a critical lever for emission reduction. Advertisers should audit their current programmatic supply chains to identify redundant intermediaries that increase both costs and carbon emissions. Each additional step in the advertising supply chain generates network requests, data synchronization and server load, contributing to higher energy consumption.

According to the document, current advertising impressions can traverse more than 15 intermediary steps, representing significant inefficiency. Collaboration with fewer strategic supply-side platform partners enables improved performance while reducing environmental impact. Advertisers should prioritize direct relationships with publishers and consolidate technology partnerships to minimize supply chain complexity.

The implementation of Global Placement Identifiers helps track advertising inventory throughout the digital ecosystem, preventing duplicative processing and reducing energy consumption. Advertisers can work with demand-side platforms to inspect bid streams and optimize purchase paths based on carbon efficiency metrics alongside traditional performance indicators.

Creative and Format Optimization

Digital advertising creative elements significantly influence campaign carbon footprints through file size, processing requirements and data transmission needs. The white paper recommends adopting "lean advertising" principles that optimize creative weight without compromising message effectiveness. Heavy video content, uncompressed images and complex animations require additional bandwidth and processing power, increasing energy consumption across the delivery chain.

Advertisers should establish creative guidelines that specify maximum file sizes, preferred compression formats and duration limits for video content. The document references IAB Europe's LEAF tool as one resource for reducing creative weight while maintaining visual quality. HTML5 formats typically offer better efficiency compared to traditional rich media implementations.

Format selection decisions should incorporate carbon emission considerations alongside reach and engagement metrics. According to the white paper, display formats generally produce lower emissions than video formats during both creation and consumption phases. Video content requires more energy for reproduction compared to static display advertisements, making format mix optimization an important sustainability lever.

Targeting and Audience Strategies

Efficient targeting reduces advertising waste while minimizing environmental impact through decreased impression volumes. The white paper emphasizes that ineffective targeting leads to enormous advertising waste by serving irrelevant messages to uninterested audiences. This inefficiency increases network requests and energy consumption without generating business value.

Advertisers should implement high-quality audience data and precise segmentation strategies while avoiding over-targeting that generates disproportionate request volumes. The document recommends monitoring impression quality continuously to optimize campaigns and reduce emissions. Frequency capping prevents excessive message repetition to individual users, reducing redundant network traffic and improving brand perception.

The adoption of interoperable identity solutions can significantly reduce energy consumption associated with cookie synchronization processes. Traditional cookie matching generates numerous requests between platforms to identify users uniquely. Shared identity frameworks like Unified ID 2.0 minimize this network traffic by providing common user identifiers across the advertising ecosystem.

Inventory Quality and Brand Safety

The white paper identifies "Made for Advertising" websites and ad-cluttered domains as significant sources of inefficient emissions. These environments typically generate artificial traffic and low-engagement impressions that waste advertising budgets and increase carbon footprints unnecessarily. 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. Advanced monitoring tools can identify and filter suspicious traffic patterns, reducing campaign emissions while improving performance metrics. The document recommends establishing quality thresholds that prevent advertising delivery to environments with poor viewability or engagement rates.

Viewability filtering ensures advertisements reach users who can actually see the content, eliminating waste associated with non-visible impressions. Setting viewability thresholds above 70% and utilizing third-party verification services provides better control over impression quality and associated carbon emissions.

Technology Platform Selection

The choice of advertising 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.

Platforms that utilize renewable energy sources for data center operations, implement server efficiency programs and provide detailed carbon reporting capabilities offer advantages for sustainability-focused campaigns. The white paper notes that some technology providers have begun integrating carbon optimization directly into their platform interfaces, enabling real-time emission reduction decisions.

According to industry developments tracked by PPC Land, major platforms including DoubleVerify and TikTok have implemented carbon measurement capabilities, while VIOOH achieved 90% lower emissions than industry standardsthrough infrastructure optimization.

Performance Integration and Reporting

Sustainable advertising practices should complement rather than compromise campaign performance objectives. The white paper emphasizes developing measurement frameworks that balance carbon emission reduction with primary campaign goals including brand awareness and conversion metrics. Advertisers should identify additional key performance indicators such as attention rates that enable format and placement optimization while maintaining branding effectiveness.

The integration of carbon cost per thousand impressions and carbon cost per dollar invested provides sustainability metrics comparable to traditional media efficiency measurements. This approach enables optimization decisions that consider both financial and environmental efficiency simultaneously.

Reporting frameworks should normalize results relative to campaign budgets to enable accurate comparison between different campaign flights. The white paper recommends establishing trade-off analyses between carbon emission objectives and primary campaign goals to guide optimization decisions effectively.

Continuous Monitoring and Optimization

Digital sustainability requires ongoing measurement and refinement rather than one-time assessment. After establishing baseline measurements, advertisers should implement continuous monitoring to track progress against emission reduction targets. The white paper outlines a cyclical approach involving measurement, optimization implementation and results verification.

Subsequent campaign flights should incorporate learnings from previous sustainability assessments to refine targeting, format selection and platform choices. The document emphasizes that optimization opportunities exist primarily during the media planning phase, where advertisers maintain greatest control over creative selection, media mix and publisher partnerships.

Regular assessment of new industry tools and measurement providers ensures access to improved sustainability capabilities as the ecosystem develops. The rapid pace of innovation in carbon measurement and reduction technologies requires ongoing evaluation of emerging solutions that could enhance environmental performance without compromising advertising effectiveness.

Timeline

• September 9, 2025: IAB Italia publishes digital sustainability white paper
• September 24, 2025: IAB Italia hosts webinar on digital advertising sustainability with working group participants
• June 2024: Global Media Sustainability Framework launched by Ad Net Zero and GARM
• June 2024: Teads launches Carbon Reduction program at Cannes Lions
• August 2025: TikTok partners with Scope3 for emissions tracking
• June 2025: DoubleVerify launches carbon tracking tool
• October 2024: InMobi launches green media deals for mobile advertising
• November 2024: VIOOH achieves 90% lower carbon emissions than industry standards

Summary

Who: IAB Italia, the Italian association dedicated to interactive advertising, published the white paper with contributions from industry experts including representatives from Azerion, ENI, Google, Havas, IAS, Index Exchange, Mediamond, Ogury, PubMatic and Taboola.

What: A comprehensive 57-page white paper outlining strategies for measuring and reducing carbon emissions from digital advertising campaigns, covering measurement methodologies, best practices for publishers and advertisers, and practical implementation steps for Italian companies.

When: Published on September 9, 2025, with an accompanying webinar held on September 24, 2025, to discuss implementation strategies with industry stakeholders.

Where: The initiative targets the Italian digital advertising market, though the methodologies and frameworks referenced align with European and global industry standards including the Global Media Sustainability Framework.

Why: Responding to growing regulatory requirements, stakeholder expectations and industry recognition that digital advertising contributes significantly to global CO₂ emissions, with internet consumption representing 10% of global electricity usage and digital technology emissions projected to reach 8.5% of global emissions by 2025.