Outbrain announces sustainability initiatives
September 20, 2023
Outbrain, a technology platform for the open web, has announced a strategic partnership with Cedara, the end-to-end carbon intelligence platform, to support Outbrain and its customers’ sustainability and decarbonisation efforts. The partnership will allow Outbrain to share in-depth emissions measurements with its advertiser partners, including those running on the company’s newly launched branding platform, Onyx by Outbrain. It will also enable the company to comprehensively measure carbon emissions across its global organisation.
In addition, the company announced the launch of its ‘Smart-Throttling’ tool – a response prediction model which uses machine learning to predict and recommend valuable requests for its Demand-Side-Platform (DSP) partners. Smart Throttling has been deployed on 80 per cent of Outbrain’s traffic and has successfully reduced the number of requests while maintaining revenue expectations for its premium publisher partners. According to Cedara’s measurement, Outbrain’s Smart Throttling capabilities saved 675 metric tons of CO2e in its first week of testing – equivalent to nearly 76,000 gallons of gasoline.
“Outbrain is committed to shaping a better and more sustainable digital advertising ecosystem, and our partnership with Cedara combined with our Smart-Throttling tool will give us another avenue to support our premium publisher partners while addressing the need to reduce carbon emissions and ensure advertisers have a transparent way to measure the impact of their campaigns,” said Yaron Galai, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Outbrain. “Our direct integrations with many of the most prestigious publishers across the globe make us supply-path-optimised by design, and this added layer will enable us to strengthen our focus on sustainability to continue building deeper partnerships with advertisers.”
Outbrain will leverage Cedara’s technology to assess its own current baseline, analyze data to identify areas for improvement, and empower advertisers to gain visibility into the emissions derived from their campaigns with Outbrain. The partnership also supports the industry-wide initiative Ad Net Zero, aimed at decarbonizing the production, distribution, and publication of advertising.
“Cedara is thrilled to further enable Outbrain’s commitment to sustainability, while supporting their publisher and advertiser partners’ own paths to net zero,” said David Shaw, CEO & Co-Founder of Cedara. “We applaud Outbrain’s industry-leading efforts at both an organisational and technological level in decarbonisation.”
Outbrain has recently implemented initiatives to drive the sustainability agenda including the introduction of OBGreen – an employee advocacy group focused on reducing the company’s carbon footprint – and updated Global Green Office Guidelines to set sustainability standards across Outbrain’s offices and operational practices.