Television may be ceding ground to the new waves of digital advertising, but it still represents an important aspect of many companies advertising strategy.

Given the vast amount of money and resources in the television industry, some major players have studied and analysed this issue in depth. Our analysis relied on the following entities; Global Media Sustainability Framework from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), Ad Zero as well as a published analysis by Carnstone on streaming media emissions.

Each life cycle stage was measured accordingly for television advertising.

Office-Related Emissions

Office-related emissions for TV advertising are calculated similarly to those for print advertising. These emissions include energy consumption, employee commuting, and general business activities related to the operation of offices involved in TV ad campaigns. A percentage of total office emissions is attributed to TV advertising based on the time and resources allocated to this activity.

Content Production

Content production for TV ads typically involves a filming process and copywriting. Due to the lack of specific data on production shoots, we assumed each TV ad required one filming session, equal to the advertisement length. This estimate accounts for the production crew, equipment, and energy consumption involved in creating the content.

We relied on a previous study that was able to determine the total carbon footprint of television broadcasts, done by the BBC. We distinguished emissions from distribution and office related emissions, and allocated the content related emissions to this section. The BBC study indicated that things like accomodation, travel, and post production add up to a hefty sum of 4.2 tonnes of CO2 per hour of production. Since our advertisements were only a dozen seconds long

Media Production

There are no additional emissions directly tied to media production for broadcast TV advertisements. The infrastructure and operations required for broadcasting are already in place for regular programming. Emissions from this stage are instead included in content production and media distribution.

Media Distribution

The media distribution stage refers to the emissions generated from getting TV ads to viewers. This life cycle stage is broken into two parts, and includes emissions from the networks and the energy consumed by viewers' devices during ad viewings.

Transmission Emissions are calculated based on the energy required to deliver the advertisement to end-user devices. These emissions depend on factors like ad duration and the number of channels the ad runs on, as well as the efficiency of the energy grid in the broadcast area. Transmission of data for television is less than for digital devices (as we'll see in Part 4 on digital advertising), and consumes approximately 9.1 watts per transmission hour according to a study done by Carnstone.

Device Emissions refer to the electricity consumed by televisions as viewers watch the ads. The total energy consumption is calculated based on the length of the advertisement and the power demand of the television during the viewing period.

Media Disposal

Since TV ads are broadcast digitally, there are no physical materials to dispose of. Additionally, the disposal of television sets is not considered, as the ads make up only a small portion of the TV's overall use. Therefore, media disposal has a negligible impact in this context.

Results

Total emissions by life cycle stage for Television advertising looked like this for our French cosmetic company:

Television advertisement emissions are dominated by the Distribution section, where device and transmission electricity each contribute to the impact. Because of this, the total emissions from this marketing modality is sensitive to electricity grid emissions. Our client was in France, which has extremely clean electricity (low carbon emissions per kwh). A similar study of television advertising emissions conducted in the USA would have approximately 7 times the total emissions!

That's all for television advertising. See you next time for part 4 on marketing emissions where we discuss digital advertising!