Marketing products can be done in a variety of ways. In our previous article we discussed the methods we used to calculate the emissions from print advertising from a French cosmetics brand. Today we’ll explore an additional marketing modality and how to calculate their emissions.

Digital Out of Home (DOOH)

DOOH advertising refers to any advertising that is done via billboard, flier, and event based marketing. Billboards these days often take the form of digital screens, so you will often see a (D) appended to the OOH acronym to include digital screen advertising.

We calculated the emissions from this marketing modality by first separating the different life cycle stages. The total emission breakdown for our client’s (D)OOH advertising looked like this.

Office Related

The life cycle stage referred to as Office Related emissions includes emissions due to the everyday maintenance of an office. This includes electricity for lighting, heating and cooling, and employee travel and commuting. These inputs were estimated based on the agency responsible for managing the marketing media. To clarify, our cosmetic brand contracted with a marketing agency, which then sub-contracted other agencies to conduct marketing efforts. In the case of office-emissions, we tracked and measured the emissions from the first marketing agency. These office emissions were allocated equally among each marketing modality (ie: 25% of office related emissions were allocated to Print Media, 25% to DOOH, etc.)

The office related emissions for DOOH were therefore the same as all other modalities measured.

Content Production Emissions

The emissions from content production included all emissions derived from a film-shoot. Regardless of the marketing modality, an image or video is displayed in some manner to advertise the product. To estimate the emissions from photoshoots, we took information from The Albert. Due to the presumed simplicity of cosmetics advertising compared to movie sets (typically less acting or locations required) we assumed a film shoot of moderately low emitting inputs. For photographic advertising, we estimated emissions per film shoot involving. For video emissions, we normalized activity data to an emission factor per hour of content produced.

Media Production

Production of media for (D)OOH is different for digital versus conventional media. In the digital case, the physical medium to account for is the digital screen. You can conduct an LCA on the screen device, and allocate the emissions embedded over the course of the advertisements run time.

For example, if a digital screen has embedded emissions equal to 1000kg CO2eq. and an expected lifespan of 10 years of run time, you can allocate emissions accordingly.

1000kg CO2eq. / 10 years = 1.9 grams CO2eq. / minute

Our client provided us data on the runtime of each of their advertisements on each screen, such that we knew the following:

• size of the screen (needed for media distribution)

• runtime of advertisement

• runs per day

• length of campaign (in days)

Using this input, we could calculate the overall emissions attributable to the screen for our client’s advertisements.

The media production for conventional OOH advertisements (printed billboards) followed a similar logic as for paper. Advertisements are printed in thicker, glossier format. We knew the size of the billboards advertised on and utilized similar inputs to our magazine advertisement production to derive emissions per billboard advertisement (adjusting where appropriate).

Media Distribution

In the case of digital media, we accounted for electricity consumption for the screen on which the advertisement was displayed in this section. Electricity consumption was estimated by evaluating screens of similar size and definition. Electricity due to data transmission was accounted for as well. (more on this accounting method in the section for Digital advertising).

In the case for traditional OOH, we calculated the electricity needed for lighting the advertisements when applicable.

Media Disposal

We followed a similar framework for the disposal of printed media, only we assumed a lower recycling rate for the materials as the paper was assumed to be laminated or plastic coated. Digital media has no associated disposal emissions accounted for.

That’s how we calculated the impact of DOOH advertisements for our client.

Join us next article for part 3 of our series on marketing emissions to see how we calculate the impact of Television Advertising!