USAA Focuses on Digital Advertising Efficiencies — and finds opportunities to reduce environmental impact

From campaign efficiency to a sustainable impact

USAA, a mission-driven financial services company that provides banking and insurance offerings to the military community and their families, strives to make an impact beyond their product and service offerings. Their marketing team continually works to highlight this impact and find ways to innovate and increase efficiencies in their strategy.

With this in mind, USAA partnered with the Yahoo DSP to test into this new capability, making them more efficient in reaching their goals and reducing their environmental impact.

To dig deeper to identify even better outcomes, the USAA team collaborated closely with Yahoo DSP and Scope3, the collaborative sustainability platform. Together, they conducted research to better understand consumer sentiment around a brand’s environmental impact and explored innovative strategies to further minimize their environmental footprint, ensuring USAA remains a dedicated steward of our shared environment by continuing to be a digital financial leader.

Digital advertising’s environmental impact‍
According to Scope3, streaming and display advertising produce 7.8 million MT of CO₂ emissions annually, this is equivalent to 10.7 billion miles driven in an average car.

How it works
Digital advertising involves a chain of players, including advertisers, demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), data management platforms (DMPs), publishers, and more, each of which contributes to carbon emissions. This is because producing ads, transferring data, and delivering ads to publishers depend on a vast network of data centers, servers, and devices that all heavily rely on electricity. Moreover, the website or app an ad runs on plays a critical role in the total emissions of a campaign. A study conducted by Scope3 and Ebiquity found that made for advertising (MFA) websites contribute 26.4% more emissions than non-MFA websites. Scope3 categorizes these as ‘climate risk’ inventory.

The good news is that advertisers can reduce the environmental impact of their campaigns by optimizing supply paths and carefully choosing where their ads are displayed. Targeting tools such as Scope3 Climate Shield and Green Media Products (GMPs) are especially effective at eliminating climate risk inventory.

The Research: consumer sentiment and reducing campaign emissions
The Yahoo DSP took a two-pronged approach to research:

1. Yahoo conducted an online survey among 1,500 consumers in April of 2024, including a subset of USAA’s target audience, to understand the value of a brand’s green efforts and its impact on purchasing behaviors.
2. In partnership with Scope3, the Yahoo DSP estimated USAA’s campaign-related greenhouse gas emissions and identified ways to reduce these emissions through in-flight campaign optimizations within an emission reduction pilot program.

What consumers are saying
‍The online survey revealed that reducing emissions benefits both the planet and the communities where businesses operate, while also enhancing a brand’s reputation. Key findings from the research include:

• Consumers are taking the environment seriously
  • 76% of consumers are concerned about environmental issues, with 70% saying a greener future is a top global issue.
  • 69% engage in environmentally conscious behaviors like recycling, reducing single-use plastics, and choosing eco-friendly products.
• Sustainability efforts shape brand image
  • 76% believe businesses should actively embrace sustainable practices.
  • Green practices shape favorable perceptions, with 70% of consumers holding more positive views of environmentally-friendly brands, associating them with being “mindful,” “respectful,” “ethical,” “progressive,” and “innovative.”
• Eco-friendly image influences purchase decisions
  • 70% of consumers consider a brand’s green practices important when making purchase decisions.
  • 51% have chosen products or services based on a brand’s green efforts, with 30% discontinuing purchases due to a lack of commitment to green practices.
  • 70% are more likely to buy from brands that actively promote their green initiatives.

‍USAA x Yahoo x Scope3 campaign emission reduction pilot‍
In January 2024, Scope3’s initial assessment of USAA’s campaign showed that impressions purchased through the Yahoo DSP already averaged 10.5% below the US benchmark for emissions. However, Scope3 identified further optimization opportunities to reduce emissions by avoiding high-emitting, low-performing domains. Yahoo, in partnership with Scope3, applied two strategies across two campaign line items within USAA’s campaign:

1. Campaign Line 1: Reduced waste by excluding climate risk and made-for-advertising (MFA) sites above the benchmark via a blocklist. Climate risk sites are high-emitting, low-performing media, and MFA sites emit 26% more carbon than non-MFA sites¹.
2. Campaign Line 2: Shifted budget to Green Media Products (GMPs), low-carbon PMP deals, available in the Yahoo DSP. GMPs decarbonize the programmatic supply chain by activating low-emission curated supply, targeting away from inventory categorized as climate risk.

The results of emission reducing optimization

The optimizations made in April 2024 led to an 11% reduction in total emissions, with a 14% decrease in distribution and storage emissions and a 6% reduction in consumer use emissions. By optimizing away from carbon-intensive publishers and MFA sites, USAA reduced both emissions and wastage. Additionally, USAA saw increased cost efficiencies, with a 17% reduction in eCPMs and a 22% reduction in cost per site visit (CPSV).

Due to the success of the campaign, USAA extended the use of their emission-reduction optimizations beyond the initial pilot period. USAA’s collaboration with Yahoo DSP and Scope3 demonstrates a commitment to making a positive impact while improving cost efficiencies.

¹Ebiquity and Scope3 Research Study, Nov 2022