Michael Hanbury-Williams, recently appointed UK Managing Director at Greenbids, discusses how the ad industry's obsession with measuring carbon emissions has become a mere box-ticking exercise, and how genuine action can be taken. He considers the next steps for the industry following GARM's dissolution, and well as examining why the UK is such an exciting market and whether digital advertising could be the first industry to reach Net Zero.

Do you think the industry is too obsessed with measurement when it comes to carbon emissions?

Yes. When measurement is mistaken for action, it becomes a mere box-ticking exercise. “This is how much carbon we’re responsible for, so let’s buy some trees and call it a day.” But focusing on individual campaigns ignores the root of the issue: the way we buy media is broken at a systemic level. The programmatic supply chain is riddled with inefficiencies that make it difficult to increase campaign scale and performance, without also ramping up emissions.

Taking emission measurements, correlating them with other traditional performance and trading metrics, and then actually reducing the total carbon footprint of an ad campaign while delivering desirable business outcomes — that’s the hard bit. That’s what Greenbids is here to do. Measurement is, of course, fundamental to track progress – and, as a baseline, should be included as standard in every campaign, on every media channel – but it’s ultimately nothing more than a starting point. Action is everything.

The clock for achieving Net Zero is ticking. Once there is no longer a business case for ignoring emissions — or, even better, acknowledgment that media quality and sustainability go hand in hand — that’s when we’ll see mass adoption of AI-optimised advertising campaigns; ones that deliver better media quality by enhancing performance, efficiency, and sustainability. 

Put simply, companies will follow the money. 

Thoughts on next steps after the end of GARM?

I’m very unhappy to see GARM dissolved off the back of heavy-handed and misguided legal pressure. That said, I’m more positive than most about the next steps. 

The team at GARM did something amazing: they brought the industry’s working groups together and fostered true, pre-competitive collaboration between holding companies and across the supply chain. That was the biggest challenge and they overcame it with true scientific rigour.

Now that the first version of the framework exists, I am certain we’re in good hands with Ad Net Zero — an initiative i’ve been involved with since its inception — and the IAB in terms of the evolution of future standards.

Greenbids is expanding into the UK – why is it such an exciting market?

Greenbids has already achieved excellent organic growth in the UK market in just a couple of years, despite being predominantly focused on (and headquartered in) France. Now, we’re putting boots on the ground in the UK and really ramping up our presence in the region — we’re here to make a big impact. 

Importantly for Greenbids, the UK market is mature from an adtech and media spend perspective. On the buy side there are renowned advertisers and agencies, while on the sell side you have some of the largest publishers in the world. The sheer volume of traffic through this supply chain has cultivated maturity in programmatic performance and the technology that supports it.

Then, from a sustainability point of view, the UK’s media industry is more mature than many other markets. We’ve got amazing cross-industry bodies — like Ad Net Zero, the IPA, Conscious Advertising Network, and Purpose Disruptors — as well as pioneering tools and standards, like AdGreen and ALBERT. These are all supported by a growing wave of publishers, platforms, and people across the board who really care about sustainability.

Greenbids is therefore arriving at a sweet spot in the UK market where we’re seeing an intersection of media quality, efficiency, and performance along with carbon reduction, at scale. This is exactly where Greenbids is best equipped to help — delivering AI-optimised advertising campaigns that enhance media performance, efficiency, and sustainability. 

Could digital advertising realistically become the first industry to reach Net Zero?

No industry will reach Net Zero as fast as we need them to. The size of the task is wildly underestimated. You only need to look at the tiny number of countries who’ve reached Net Zero already — just eight! — most of which are covered in rainforest.

You might have sectors where one or two companies are leading the way and getting closer to Net Zero, but it will be many decades before an entire industry does it. The laggards are holding us all back, and the next few years are going to be a real fight. Ideally, industries will see Net Zero not as a final destination but the beginning of a regenerative, nature-positive way of doing business.

As for advertising, I will say that our industry should be easier to decarbonise than many others. We’re a service industry, after all, we’re not manufacturing anything. But even if we switch our entire energy system to carbon-free electricity and have “greener” campaigns than ever before, we’d still be left with the elephant in the room: advertising encourages consumerism.

We might solve our campaign carbon problem — and make no mistake, it absolutely has to be solved — long before we truly solve our sustainability problem. 

So, why the move to Greenbids? What sets the company apart from others in the sustainability space?

I’ve been agency-side for over 10 years in a variety of roles, working with a lot of tech partners across the entire ecosystem. I therefore had a lot of reference points when it came to thinking about my next career move. And yet going to Greenbids was a very easy decision.

At UM, I was a client of Greenbids for 18 months and I was blown away – not just by the effectiveness of the product, but also the quality and passion of the team. They were the most impressive tech partner I’d met in my career to date, smashing every test we set them and proving that media effectiveness, quality, and efficiency don’t have to cost the Earth.

The company’s unique positioning is also noteworthy. It’s an AI-based company which was built from the ground up with performance, quality, and carbon in mind, whereas other companies in this space have retrofitted existing products to include carbon. To join a leading company such as this – one that seeks to improve media effectiveness and address our role in the climate crisis – was a no-brainer.