Brian O'Kelley Has Heard the Criticism

How do we know is Scope3 knows if you ad tech is green or not?

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Back in June, I moderated a panel at Cannes on sustainability and digital ad tech.

Perhaps because I was tired, or looking for a cheap laugh, but I kicked off the session by asking, “how do we know this isn’t all bullshit?”

The good news is that I got the laugh, and I think loosened up the room a bit to have a valuable discussion with some degree of brutal honesty.

Because it’s hard not to be a touch skeptical about the cottage industry of companies promising to help digital advertising clean up its act from an environmental perspective. I mean, how can anybody really know how much electricity various ad tech companies are using, right? And who’s really going to check - or is capable of checking - whether these various efforts at carbon footprint reduction are actually happening or worthwhile?

Business Insider has a helpful rundown of six companies that are claiming to help brands get more green in their media spending, but the one that has gotten the most attention has surely been Scope3. That’s because, of course, it’s been founded by Brian O’Kelley - yes, that Brian O’Kelley - who founded AppNexus, was there when Right Media sold to Yahoo, and helped establish the messy ad tech maze we all know and love.

Wait, some cynical person might say. The guy who helped bring about all this murkiness and ad tech taxes and daisy-chaining and fraud somehow got religion and wants to save the planet? Seriously?

Well, since launching last year, Scope3 has been out there, lobbying/exhorting the ad tech world to examine just how much energy it uses, in particular how much is wasted through the endless number of hops and bids that regularly occur each and every time a digital ad runs, or even just might run.

Regardless of O’Kelley’s history - or because of it- there are plenty of people in the digital ad industry who are fully on board with the Scope3 mission. Yet there are a number of critics - some of who I heard from after my Cannes panel.

Among the critiques lobbed O’Kelley’s way:

• Who says Scope3’s tools are effective and accurate? In other industries, companies that are in the business of reducing carbon emissions follow specific protocols and are evaluated by globally recognized third parties such as the International Standards Organizations. Why hasn’t Scope3 done the same?

• When Scope3 helps companies pay for carbon offsets, where does that money go exactly? How do we know if Scope3 got the best prices?

• Is focusing on the number of bids and hops even the right approach? For instance, if you work with only carbon-neutral companies, does it matter how many actual ad tech firms you work with?

• Why are we focused on the legitimate digital ad ecosystem? If we choked off digital ad fraud, and all the serving power that uses, wouldn’t that have a much bigger impact?

• Is Scope3 itself 100% ‘green?’

I caught up with O’Kelley this week to lay this all on him. He’s heard a lot of it. Some of it he sees as fair -and some as highly nit picky, or even disingenuous.

What it comes down to, in his mind, is the big picture mission. “Ad tech today is inefficient, expensive and wasteful,” he said. So the question he asks people is, “do you believe that running redundant auctions uses a lot of electricity [and that should be reduced?] Does it matter if we are talking about 72 grams or 101 grams [of measured reductions]? It just seems dumb to have these redundant auctions.”

O’Kelley said as an industry, ad leaders have tried to raise alarms about high ad tech taxes and fraud and privacy, and “nothing really happened.”

“It’s always someone else’s money,” he said. But it’s everyone’s planet. And beyond that, every CMO and media executive is getting pressure to tackle these problems from bosses and investors.

So O’Kelley’s overall take is, we can bicker about methodologies and data set, or we can get started actually tackling problems.

“Maybe we should get a seal of approval from [a recognized environmental body],” he said. “But we’ve run this work by GroupM, PWC, Accenture, Microsoft. Programmatic advertising is unique and complicated. I can prove [what we’re doing] with data from other companies. I know that Criteo has 42,000 servers and eight data centers. Companies send us their emissions reports. They send us their AWS bills.”

Ok, but what about some of the grumbling I’ve heard that Scope3’s contractual language indicates that its findings are based on modeling, and should be used with caution. O’Kelley noted that many data-science based services employ models, including weather forecasting. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

As for its own output, O’Kelley agreed that Scope3 itself needs to do all it can and more to be transparent. “That’s a fair point,” he said. “We should be the best.”

But a startup like Scope3’s carbon output is likely to be a drop it the bucket compared to bigger players in this business. O’Kelley wonders whether some of this griping is just coming from “fancy environmental consultants.”

“If we are arguing over 1.1 versus 1.2 carbon metric tons, what’s the difference?” he said. He likened this scenario to various research reports that came out decades ago about the dangers of smoking.

“If one report says smoking carries a 20% risk of cancer, and another says it’s only 15%, should you wait for more data, or stop smoking?”