As published in our fourth annual CitizenSnap Report, we made progress on fulfilling our climate commitments on both climate mitigation and operational improvements. We continued to take responsibility for not only our current and future carbon footprint, but also for the carbon we created in the past. We used our platform’s reach to raise climate crisis awareness and empower Snapchatters to take action. One priority of ours is addressing the climate crisis by reducing the carbon footprint of our products and operations. This references every aspect of our business, including our ad business.
The sustainability conversation has also entered the boardroom. Brands, agencies, and ad tech providers alike are beginning to tackle these issues as we begin to see increasing pressure from current and potential partners over their environmental practices.¹
Partnering With Scope3 to Measure Snap’s Carbon Emissions
In order to understand the carbon footprint of our advertising, we are pleased to announce our partnership with Scope3. Scope3 is a collaborative sustainability platform decarbonizing media and advertising. Its platform visualizes and measures the advertising emissions across the entire ad ecosystem to help advertisers understand the carbon footprint of their ad campaigns. Scope3 has been working with Snap to both refine and enhance its emissions model for the platform as well as to provide granular measurement of Snap’s bespoke ad formats.
Snapchat’s partnership with Scope3 is the first of its kind as the first messaging platform to directly contribute data to Scope3’s emissions model. The partnership enhances the accuracy of Scope3’s model for social and messaging, which is built using a combination of public and third-party data sources. These efforts improve the industry’s understanding of the total impact this channel has on carbon emissions generated by advertising as a whole.
Preliminary benchmarks suggest that advertising on social media and messaging apps accounts for 3.36M metric tons of carbon emissions every year across 5 major markets (US, UK, DE, FR and AU). Based on initial measurement, Snapchat ranks as the most carbon efficient among similar apps — specifically, it is 39% more efficient than others in the category. Compared to programmatic advertising, Snap is about 60% more efficient.
Snapchat is also the first to contribute additional data for its unique ad formats, both Video and Augmented Reality. Formats like Lenses and Skippable Video are significantly low carbon compared to other formats available to marketers. Lenses in particular are so light and efficient that Scope3 modified its ad formats model to properly measure them. Snapchat will be available in Scope3’s emissions dashboard for agencies and advertisers already subscribing to their services.
At Snap we are committed to being kind to the planet. Partnerships with organizations like Scope3 are necessary for being able to accurately map the emissions of the ad industry and enable brands to create a plan for carbon reduction. For more information on our current efforts, please read our latest sustainability report. For more information on our current efforts, including Scope3’s measurement, please reach out to your Snap Sales Rep or Marketing Science Lead.