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Year in Review: Thomas Koch | TK-One

How green was the media year 2024? Exclusively for invidis, Thomas Koch of TK One – Germany’s undisputed Out of Home advertising expert – looks back at 2024 and the challenges of the DooH-industry to reduce its carbon footprint.

Our advertising industry is known to be consuming more than one percent of global energy consumption and unfortunately is therefore also responsible for one percent of global emissions. If you add the digital platform infrastructure, which is financed exclusively by advertising, you get four to five percent – as much as global air traffic. Every single ad impression causes between 0.1 and 1.1 grams of CO2. Every online campaign delivers millions of ad impressions to their target groups. And agencies celebrate delivering more impressions than they promised.

Of course, it is our declared goal to reduce the emissions caused by advertising campaigns every year. More and more advertisers need to file compulsory sustainability reports and the media sector is a welcome source of reductions. Word has gotten around that carbon savings in the media mix do not necessarily weaken the media strategy, but – on the contrary – by adding lower-emission media such as audio or DooH, they lead to increases in reach and visibility while simultaneously reducing the CPM. Sounds like a win-win.

“How was I?”

So let’s get to the crucial question of what progress our industry has made in terms of sustainability in 2024: “How was I?” March already began with a bang. First of all, the jury of the German Media Awards was unable to select any winners in the new “Green Media” category. The nominees cases lacked sufficient evidence. In this regard, dear advertising industry, we must become considerably better in 2025.

But then the jury of the Green CMO Awards chose Markus Riese, Marketing Director of Bayerischer Rundfunk, as the Green CMO 2024 for his outstanding commitment and his pioneering initiatives in the field of sustainability. It was exemplary and actually groundbreaking to see how much a single, committed person can achieve in his organization within a relatively short period of time. Hopefully this will be an incentive for many marketing people.

In the months that followed, there seemed to be no groundbreaking reports about increased sustainability in marketing, advertising and media. But only apparently. Because the structure of the media mix is ​​constantly changing. Print advertising due to it’s large carbon footprint should not be eliminated from the media plans, but every print ad less means less carbon emissions.

A continuous development that will help to make our campaigns more sustainable all by itself. We expect a similar development in TV: the shift every advertising Euro less invested in broadcast television and instead in CTV means a reduction in CO2 emissions by more than a third. We are on the right track.

DooH is growing significantly by double digits this year. Since this growth is far above the overall development of the advertising market, it means that media managers are supplementing and replacing other media in the mix with DooH. This also contributes to reducing media carbon emissions, because DooH is the most climate-friendly of all media per advertising contact.

Plenty of advertising market challenges remain

On the other hand, we urgently need to work on the emissions caused by programmatic online. Digital media continues to grow, with display advertising alone growing by 12 percent – and with it an irresponsible energy consumption. However, innovations are being introduced to streamline the tech stacks and value chain, which can save a large proportion of emissions. This also sounds promising.

The bottom line is that a lot more has happened this year in terms of sustainability than it appears at first glance. Nevertheless, it is the minimum of what we are obliged to do as a conscientious industry. If we don’t rest on our laurels but get to work, we can make 2025 a year of advertising sustainability that we can rightly be proud of.

Translated by invidis editorial staff