How DSPs are cleaning up their supply chains

As digital advertising evolves, sustainability is not just a buzzword — it’s a business imperative. Beyond green messaging, brands recognize that media buying directly impacts their carbon footprint.

At the Green Media Summit in New York last week, industry leaders from StackAdapt, Yahoo and FreeWheel explored how demand-side platforms (DSPs) transform programmatic advertising into a more sustainable ecosystem. That means improving efficiency by addressing duplication, cleaning up the supply chain and deploying AI to streamline processes.

Despite political turbulence in the U.S., industry leaders remained committed to sustainability. Chandra Cirulnick, VP of global supply partnerships at Yahoo, emphasized that sustainability isn’t just a nice-to-have. “Sustainability is no longer a separate initiative,” she said. “More sustainable media leads to better business outcomes, and that is what will drive mass adoption and change.”

Reducing duplication to cut carbon emissions

One of digital advertising’s biggest sustainability challenges is bid request duplication. Excessive bid requests generate unnecessary data loads, increasing electricity consumption and enlarging carbon footprints of DSPs.

“A single ad opportunity could generate up to 400 bid requests, resulting in enormous infrastructure loads and inefficiencies,” said Greg Joseph, VP of inventory development at StackAdapt. To tackle this, StackAdapt is working to ensure buyers won’t be bidding against themselves, reducing overall system waste.

This is especially pronounced in connected TV (CTV) advertising, where transactions are often deal-based, leading to overlapping supply paths that hinder efficiency. Matt Clark, VP of strategic partnerships at FreeWheel, emphasized the broader adoption of OpenRTB 2.6 standards, which allows buyers to bid on specific slots within an ad break, significantly cutting down duplication in CTV advertising.

“The duplication we’re seeing in CTV has grown exponentially over the last 12 months, and it’s accelerating at an extremely fast pace,” Clark said. To curb this, FreeWheel enforces stringent traffic management policies that limit unnecessary bid requests and optimize queries per second.

Yahoo is taking a proactive approach. Cirulnick explained that Yahoo integrates pre-bid targeting for carbon-efficient media, direct-to-publisher solutions that cut down on excess emissions and internal programs that track the company’s own carbon emissions.

Panelists also brought up how supply path optimization (SPO) can help reduce emissions by cutting out redundant intermediaries. StackAdapt and Yahoo focus on direct publisher relationships to streamline the supply chain.

“There are some instances where you’re going three to four to five hops before you get access to an individual publisher — that is not sustainable at all,” said StackAdapt’s Joseph.

Can AI help sustainable ad buying?

AI has revolutionized programmatic advertising, but it also demands significant energy.

StackAdapt incorporates AI into its DSP infrastructure to streamline campaign setup and creative optimization. Tasks that once took two hours can now be executed in seconds, enhancing efficiency and reducing waste, he explained.

“How do we reduce all the time buyers are spending in email chains optimizing the campaigns and really create more of a seamless process?” Joseph asked.

But while AI tools can add efficiency to processes when it comes to things like bid optimization, Clark pointed out that AI relies on vast amounts of auction data, leading to higher energy consumption.

“The conversations we’re having with [agencies] are: how can we plug you into [AI] and not blow up your infrastructure costs overnight?” he explained. FreeWheel collaborates with agencies to ensure AI tools are integrated efficiently, minimizing their environmental impact while maximizing effectiveness.

Cirulnick stressed the importance of transparency regarding AI energy consumption. “AI is super energy-heavy, and from an open emission perspective and obviously a cost perspective, we need a lot more transparency around the energy required for every query, every algorithm that’s being run,” she emphasized.

Collaborating towards a greener ad tech ecosystem

A big takeaway: Industry-wide collaboration is essential to accelerating sustainability efforts. From DSPs to supply-side platforms (SSPs), publishers and advertisers, each stakeholder must contribute to reducing carbon footprints and optimizing supply chains.

Cirulnick underscored the need for more case studies proving that sustainable media can lead to better results. “We are absolutely seeing that more sustainable media leads to better business outcomes, and ultimately, that is what is going to drive adoption and change,” she said. She cited a success story where a major financial advertiser reduced campaign emissions by 11% while improving cost efficiency and performance.

Clark added that as advertisers gain more visibility into the environmental and financial costs of media buying, they’ll have stronger incentives to adopt sustainable practices. DSPs will continue to be at the forefront of this change.

“The transformation of programmatic advertising into a sustainability-driven ecosystem is not just a necessity for the environment — it’s also a competitive advantage that drives better performance and efficiency,” Cirulnick concluded.