Advertising’s reset:
Making programmatic sustainable

For over a decade, programmatic advertising has been celebrated as the beating heart of digital media, a technological marvel that promised automation, precision, and efficiency at scale. It was meant to deliver ads to the right people at the right time. Additionally, it aimed to reduce waste and maximize ROI. Yet today, that promise looks increasingly hollow. Behind the glossy rhetoric of “real-time optimization” lies an ecosystem burdened by inefficiencies, environmental costs, and a crisis of trust.

Programmatic’s architecture, built on endless auctions, layered intermediaries, and opaque algorithms, has created a system that is as complex as it is unsustainable. The numbers speak for themselves. Studies by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimate that between 15% and 30% of digital ad budgets evaporate through fraud, non-viewable placements, or meaningless impressions on junk inventory. That represents billions of dollars annually lost not merely to inefficiency. It is also lost to structural opacity.

The hidden costs of automation

The issue, however, goes beyond financial waste. Every automated bid, every impression served, and every data signal exchanged has an environmental footprint. According to Scope3, certain ad placements can emit up to 26 times more carbon than others. That’s a staggering figure when one considers that the internet as a whole is responsible for around 4% of global CO₂ emissions. This rivals the aviation industry in scale. What was once touted as the epitome of efficiency is now an unmonitored contributor to the climate crisis.

Marketers face another problem: opacity. The programmatic supply chain often feels like a labyrinth. Here, advertisers struggle to trace where their money actually goes or what impact it truly generates. Between walled gardens, data brokers, and hidden markups, trust in digital advertising has eroded. What began as a system designed to...