Sustainability in programmatic: why efficiency and transparency are converging again

Over the last cycle of programmatic advertising, sustainability moved from a core strategic topic to something more peripheral. Between 2020 and 2024, carbon impact was widely discussed across the ecosystem, driven by regulatory momentum in Europe and increasing pressure from advertisers to understand the environmental footprint of media activation.

At that time, sustainability and supply chain transparency were closely linked. Programmatic infrastructure, with its multi-layered auction mechanics and opaque intermediaries, became a natural focus for scrutiny.

More recently, however, the industry conversation has shifted. AI-driven optimisation, CTV expansion, and macroeconomic pressure have pushed efficiency and ROI back to the top of the agenda. Sustainability has not disappeared, but it is often treated as a secondary concern rather than a structural requirement.

This separation is misleading. In programmatic, efficiency and sustainability are effectively the same problem expressed in different terms.

Inefficiency is the real emissions driver

The programmatic ecosystem still contains significant structural waste. Redundant bid requests, unnecessary intermediaries, duplicated auctions and low-quality inventory all contribute to two outcomes at once: higher media costs and higher infrastructure load.

From an operational perspective, this is inefficiency. From a sustainability perspective, it is unnecessary emissions.

The key issue is that much of this waste is invisible in traditional reporting frameworks. It is distributed across the supply chain, making it difficult to isolate without deeper transaction-level analysis.

Why current measurement approaches fall short

A common limitation in today’s sustainability measurement is the reliance on proxy signals such as ads.txt structures to estimate supply chain ‘complexity’ or carbon intensity.

While useful as a directional indicator, this approach is structurally incomplete. It does not reflect real-time auction dynamics, does not capture bid duplication, and cannot account for how impressions are actually routed across demand paths.

As a result, optimisation decisions based on these proxies can be misleading. Some publishers may be unfairly penalised based on structural signals rather than actual inefficiency, while real sources of waste remain untouched.

The industry is gradually recognising that sustainability metrics need to move closer to the actual mechanics of bidding and delivery, not static file-based assumptions.

Where optimisation actually happens

More mature approaches to sustainability in programmatic focus less on theoretical scoring and more on controllable levers within the media supply chain.

These include supply path efficiency, reduction of duplicated auctions, and systematic removal of low-quality or non-performing inventory. Each of these interventions improves performance while also reducing unnecessary processing across the ecosystem.

This is where the alignment between sustainability and business outcomes becomes most evident. Less waste means faster decisioning, cleaner auctions, and improved ROI.

The role of curation and supply path intelligence

This shift toward operational efficiency has accelerated the importance of curation technologies and supply path optimisation frameworks.

At EscalaX, we work every day to improve our sustainability performance and advance in this area. There is still a long way to go, but it is always one of our priorities.

The key idea is not to filter for sustainability as a separate layer, but to design cleaner auction environments by default. This involves reducing unnecessary hops, adding value and reducing wasteful calls, among other actions”, says Ana García Castro, CEO of EscalaX.

When applied correctly, this approach naturally improves both media efficiency and environmental impact without requiring separate optimisation logic.

A more practical definition of sustainable programmatic

Insights emerging across the industry point toward a more pragmatic definition of sustainability.

Rather than relying on abstract carbon scoring models alone, the focus is shifting toward measurable system efficiency: fewer wasted bids, fewer redundant intermediaries, and higher quality impressions per unit of compute.

In this framing, sustainability is not a reporting layer. It is a byproduct of better infrastructure design.

Where the market is heading

The current deprioritisation of carbon discussions in favour of AI and CTV may be temporary. As regulation evolves and measurement methodologies mature, sustainability is likely to return as a core requirement, but in a more operational form.

What is changing is the language. The industry is moving away from ‘carbon reduction’ as a standalone goal and toward ‘system efficiency’ as the primary optimisation lens.

For advertisers, agencies and technology providers, the implication is clear. The most sustainable impression is the one that did not require unnecessary auctions, intermediaries or processing to be delivered.

In that sense, sustainability and performance optimisation are no longer parallel tracks. They are converging into the same discipline.