If you walk through the streets of Zurich or Berlin today, you might think you’ve stumbled into a modern-day reenactment of Don Quixote. Instead of giants, local political initiatives are tilting at a new kind of windmill: the Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) screen.
The argument is always the same: “Look at that bright screen! Think of the power it consumes! Think of the planet!” It’s a well-meaning sentiment, but it’s based on a massive logical pothole. These initiatives are focused on visibility, not efficiency. And in the world of sustainability, focusing on what you can see while ignoring what you can’t is a recipe for a carbon disaster.
Imagine you see a massive SBB train pulling out of the station. It’s humming with electricity, drawing huge amounts of power from the grid. Now, imagine a single Fiat 500 driving beside it.
If you only look at the energy meter for a single vehicle, the Fiat wins every time. It uses a fraction of the power. But if you want to move 500 people across the country, you’d need 500 Fiats. Suddenly, the "efficient" little car looks like an environmental nightmare, while the "power-hungry" train is the greenest thing on tracks.
DOOH is the high-speed train of advertising. Yes, a screen uses more power than your smartphone. But a screen in the Dubai Metro or at a busy Swiss intersection reaches hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously. Your smartphone reaches exactly one person: you.
Why is this so hard for people to understand? Because centralized infrastructure is visible, while decentralized infrastructure is diffuse.
We see the screen on the street corner, so we point the finger. We don't see the massive, heat-spewing server farms in the US or the complex network of cell towers required to deliver a single video ad to 100,000 individual iPhones.
When you look at the GreenGRP—a metric developed by iDOOH to calculate how much CO2 it takes to reach a segment of the population—the results are shocking to the "anti-screen" crowd:
Then there’s the "natural" alternative: the paper poster. It feels green, right? It’s just paper!
But paper doesn’t grow on walls. To get a poster into the public eye, you have to:
In contrast, to change a creative on an Adtrac-managed screen, we send a few electrons over the internet. No trucks, no glue, no paper mills. In the battle of "Logistics vs. Light," the light wins every time.
If the political initiatives in Switzerland and Germany truly wanted to lower the carbon footprint of the advertising industry, they wouldn't be trying to dim the screens. They would be trying to channel more advertising toward them.
Every ad moved from a power-hungry server farm or a chemical-heavy paper mill onto a high-efficiency DOOH screen is actually a win for the planet.
It’s time to stop fighting windmills and start looking at the math. The greenest way to talk to a city isn't through the 500 Fiats in everyone's pockets: it's through the high-speed digital train in the street.