‘Godfather of adtech’ undoes his own work: Brian O’Kelley

When you consider the implications of programmatic advertising, like ad fraud, privacy challenges and environmental externalities, you largely have Brian O’Kelley to thank, as it was his design of an auction system that underpins much of today’s adtech industry.

While it was during his time as CTO at Right Media that the godfather of adtech designed advertising auctions, these days he runs Scope3, and is attempting to rectify the environmental challenges that his own invention has caused.

“Why did I come up with this? I don't know. But it made a lot of sense at the time and has become a massive industry. A hundred billion dollars of ads are auctioned like that every year, and so it's an environmental disaster,” O’Kelley told Digital Nation Australia.

According to O’Kelley, the emissions profile of the digital advertising industry is equivalent to one gram of carbon per ad impression on a web page.

“It takes about a thousand servers in data centres spinning up and doing things to deliver that ad. That makes it more tangible because it's not like ‘digital’. We talk about that but, it's a wire that goes to a big warehouse full of servers.

"In those servers, they cause heat and electricity every time they do anything. Think about how much electricity is being to generate that ad. That's material,” he said.

An average person consumes about a million ad impressions in a year, according to O’Kelley, which adds up to about a metric ton of carbon emissions per person, solely derived from their individual ad consumption.

But instead of asking consumers to install ad blockers to mitigate the problem, O’Kelley believes it's up to the industry to improve efficiency and decarbonise advertising.

“Advertisers realise the impact they're having. They're asking for solutions, and what we're trying to do is not just measure this impact, but give very clear ways that everybody in the ecosystem can reduce the harm they're causing and reduce that waste.

“There's nothing inherently wrong with auctioning ads or having real-time decisions made. It's just the way it's developed and the way it's done is super inefficient.”

Scope3 launched in Australia last week and will be led by JAPAC lead, June Cheung.