How Decentriq improves energy efficiency in digital advertising

Digital advertising can be very energy-intensive. The infrastructure behind programmatic ad delivery is a hidden drain on global energy and emissions. At Decentriq, we're reducing that footprint by improving how ads are targeted and delivered. Fewer wasted impressions, smarter data use, and less computational overhead without sacrificing performance.

The scale of energy consumption in online advertising

Programmatic advertising is an emissions heavyweight. Across just five major economies, it generates an estimated 215,000 metric tons of CO₂e every month — on par with the entire aviation sector’s share of global GHG emissions. Why? Exploding internet traffic, rising data center workloads, and inefficient ad delivery systems. Between 2015 and 2022, data center workloads surged +340%, with electricity consumption reaching up to 340 TWh per year — that’s over 1% of global demand.

Online ads aren’t just clogging up user experiences — they’re burning serious energy behind the scenes.

Measuring the footprint

The ad industry now has a way to track its emissions: gCO₂PM, or grams of CO₂ per thousand impressions. According to Scope3, the average campaign emits around 514.8 gCO₂PM — about the same as running a full load of laundry. And more than 60% of that comes from ad selection alone, thanks to the bloated and repetitive processes in today’s programmatic stacks.

This metric puts emissions into a language marketers understand. And more importantly, it gives us a way to start reducing them.

Cutting ad volume with clean data

Traditional programmatic methods are losing their edge. As third-party signals degrade, some advertisers compensate by increasing volume — bombarding more users with more impressions just to meet reach goals.

Decentriq flips that model. Using our privacy-enhancing data clean rooms, publishers can check if a user matches a pre-defined audience before any ad is shown. That means fewer, better-targeted impressions and no need to flood the system.

The result? One A/B test showed a 33% reduction in total ads delivered, but with a significant increase in conversions. Better outcomes, less waste.

Eliminating energy-intensive ad selection

Traditional programmatic ad delivery is messy. A single impression passes through multiple platforms — SSPs, DSPs, exchanges — all running real-time auctions. Each step adds more data transfer, more compute cycles, and more emissions.

With Decentriq, all of that gets streamlined. Ad targeting happens inside the data clean room. No user data leaves the publisher, and no open auction is needed. The result is up to 60% lower energy use per impression, just by removing redundant DSP interactions.

Smarter targeting means less waste

Wasted impressions don’t just kill campaign performance — they burn energy. Every mistargeted ad is a computational dead end.

Decentriq minimizes this waste across three dimensions:

Data processing

We eliminate unnecessary data transfers by matching audiences securely inside the clean room.

Targeting precision

Real-time, granular audience insights improve match rates and reduce misfires—saving an estimated 24.81% in energy use.

Computational load

Decentriq reduces system hops per impression from 6–8 down to just one or two.

Taken together, these improvements drive real emissions reductions. Where the average campaign generates 514.8 gCO₂PM, Decentriq-powered campaigns average 154.8 gCO₂PM — a ~70% decrease in emissions compared to traditional methods.

If sustainability factors into how you choose a data clean room provider, Decentriq is the clear choice: Efficient, privacy-first, and better for the planet.

Get in touch to start sustainably collaborating today.