smartclip’s role in supporting Bertelsmann’s climate-neutral 2030 goals

Sustainability is no longer optional — it’s essential for building a successful, resilient business. At smartclip, we take this responsibility seriously, driving sustainability across our products, services, and operations. It’s not just about meeting the expectations of our clients, partners, and stakeholders — it’s simply the right thing to do.

The environmental impact of the adtech industry may seem less obvious than sectors like manufacturing or transportation, but it’s significant. Programmatic advertising alone generates over 215,000 metric tons of carbon emissions monthly across the US, UK, Australia, Germany, and France — equivalent to 24 million gallons of gasoline. That’s why it’s crucial for companies like ours to reduce emissions, optimise energy use, and put sustainability at the forefront of our operations, as we recently highlighted during our company offsite.

How adtech impacts the environment

It might seem hard to imagine that everyday digital actions like sending an email, loading a webpage, or serving an ad could have a significant environmental impact. But every digital activity requires energy, and the infrastructure behind it — data centres, networks, and devices — uses a tremendous amount of power for both processing and cooling.

While cleaner sources of energy are on the rise, a large proportion of electricity generation still involves burning fossil fuels, which emits greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2). Serving a single ad to one device may produce a negligible amount of GHGs, but when you scale that up to millions of ads daily, with multiple systems and data transfers involved in programmatic advertising, the impact quickly grows. As global data traffic surged by 23% in 2023 (year-on-year), the responsibility is on all of us in adtech to play our part in minimising the environmental impact of this increasing demand for data and energy. 

Also, just like all other industries, the adtech industry consumes energy through the activities of its employees as they commute, travel for business, participate in and organise events/meetings, and use office equipment, so this is another key area to tackle in the drive to reduce our environmental impact.

Bertelsmann’s climate-neutral goal

Bertelsmann, the parent company of RTL Group, has integrated environmental protection into its core corporate values. In 2020, the company set an ambitious goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. Bertelsmann is aiming to reduce the GHG emissions generated at its locations, by its employees’ mobility, and the manufacturing of its own products by 50% compared with 2018. Measures include switching to 100% green electricity, installing additional solar systems, improving energy efficiency, and using alternative mobility concepts. Bertelsmann will offset remaining emissions through in-house climate protection projects and by purchasing carbon credits.

How smartclip is contributing to this goal

At smartclip, we recognise that our core product is inherently energy-intensive, relying heavily on electricity. To align with Bertelsmann’s climate-neutral goal by 2030, we are focusing on three key areas to reduce emissions associated with delivering our services:

1. Optimising infrastructure

We have switched to the modern Kubernetes infrastructure setup, reducing hardware resources to a tenth of what was previously required. We have also implemented autoscaling to dynamically adjust hardware resources based on fluctuating demand, ensuring emissions are minimised during low-demand periods.

2. Optimising selection processes and exchanges with external systems

Approximately 60% of emissions generated by programmatic advertising come from ‘ad selection emissions’ and the complex supply chain (resellers, data brokers, etc.) involved in this process. To tackle this, we’ve consolidated and compressed bid requests while enhancing bid request optimisation and optimising the selection process to minimise redundant data exchanges with external systems. We have enhanced our bid request pacing processes to ensure we don’t send unnecessary requests to demand-side platforms (DSPs) if there’s no bid potential. We focus on quality inventory and, as all auctions are deal-based, we include bid floors so DSPs don’t respond with low bids. By utilising ProbabilisticID, HH-Graph, and our multi-ID hub, we consolidate identifiers, reducing wasted contacts and improving frequency control, and cookie syncs are limited to essential cases, such as when an ad is delivered, to reduce redundant syncs.

3. Optimising creative delivery

We have invested in initiatives to improve the efficiency of creative delivery, including connecting AdManagement APIs to avoid the repeated transmission of creative bids and optimising creative quality levels by allowing the publisher’s player to choose the least emissions-intensive option while maintaining sufficient quality (this can be further optimised to include only device-specific assets). By default, we support VAST standards with Lazy Load Ads, which are loaded depending on the specific scenario, reducing unnecessary data transfers, and we ensure only relevant and emissions-efficient creative assets are delivered to the user.

Alongside focusing on the impact of our digital activities, we are also prioritising sustainability in our employees’ activities. In Germany, we’ve coined the phrase ‘Year of the Bratwurst’ to symbolise a shift towards more resource-conscious choices. Just as opting for a simple bratwurst over a fancy dinner represents cutting back on unnecessary indulgence, this approach reflects our commitment to conserving resources and reducing expenses. With this in mind, we encourage staff to minimise unnecessary travel by embracing virtual meetings. And when travel is essential, we prioritise alternatives to domestic flights, such as travelling by train or carpooling, and always look to optimise schedules by combining multiple appointments. To save on commuting emissions, hybrid working is now inherent to our way of working at smartclip.  

And finally, just as data plays an integral role in our adtech products and services, it is also central to ensuring all the sustainability initiatives mentioned above are having the desired impact. We are, therefore, implementing robust data measurement procedures to evaluate our progress, and we are committed to enhancing our data gathering so we can improve our insights and use this data to inform future decisions.

Balancing profit, people, and the planet

For companies such as ours, the push for sustainability is about challenging our own practices, encouraging our providers and partners to do better, making informed decisions based on solid data, and setting ambitious goals. However, to build a truly sustainable business, it is also vital we balance the ‘triple bottom line’ — profit, people, and the planet. At smartclip, sustainability isn’t just about reducing emissions. It’s about ensuring the actions we take not only support our environmental goals but also create value for our people (clients, partners, and employees) and maintain profitability. Finding this balance can be difficult, but it is essential for long-term success.