Decarbonising Digital: AdTech's Greener Future with Michael Hanbury-Williams

Greenbids’ Michael Hanbury-Williams on the win-win of ROI-boosting media decarbonisation

In our latest episode, we talk to Michael Hanbury-Williams, UK Managing Director of Greenbids. Built to decarbonise digital advertising while also boosting advertiser ROI, Greenbids’ AI algorithms can be deployed in just a few clicks to steer campaigns towards more efficient and effective outcomes.

The quarter-life crisis that prompted a climate career pivot

 Before joining Greenbids, Michael had been working in the media industry for more than a decade, first as a print and digital buyer at ZenithOptimedia, then a series of digital roles at UM.

“Then in about 2019 I had an existential crisis — just a little one — a sort of quarter-life crisis. I thought, ‘Do I really want to be just working in ads, selling stuff to people who don't really need it when there's a climate emergency happening?’ And it was the same time as Ad Net Zero had just started, and the industry was starting to pay a little bit of attention to sustainability as a big, general topic.”

Michael carved out a role within UM where for one day a week he could focus on sustainability initiatives, which bit by bit became his full-time job. It was through researching and testing different media decarbonisation partners that Michael discovered Greenbids, and was so impressed he joined the company. “No partner that I worked with worked as well, as fast, or was as scalable as Greenbids.”

More performance for less carbon: Greenbids’ win-win proposition

So, who are Greenbids, the company that stole Michael’s heart?

“We are a company that builds custom [bidding] algorithms. Half of our workforce are serious machine learning data engineers, data scientists. The technicalities of what they do is way beyond my comfort zone.”

“The company was founded because the [founders] spotted that online advertising industry was sort of fundamentally broken, the way that advertising campaigns are bought and traded and optimised is not always in the advertiser’s best interest. It's not always in the publisher's best interest either.”

“Our tech basically allows advertisers and their agencies to make their campaigns more effective, efficient, and increase the media quality within their online advertising, and — because we have the carbon angle to our business as well — do it in a way that also reduces carbon. 

Michael recognises that interest in sustainability will ebb and flow, so Greenbids uses media performance as a sort of Trojan horse for decarbonisation, regardless of whether or not the client has an interest in sustainability — though many do.

 “Marketers, clients, advertisers; they're never not going to want ROI. They're never not going to want media quality or effectiveness or efficiency. So, if you can give them that — and, by the way, also help their sustainability goals — it's a win-win. That's what our tech's been proving for the last three years since we launched it: you can have both. You can just do good work that is better for your business and also better for the planet.”

The lightweight AI that trims programmatic supply chain waste

Greenbids uses AI to improve media performance and reduce carbon emissions, but don’t confuse them for another company jumping on the AI bandwagon: “I think people don't realise that the ad industry has been using AI as a broad concept (really, machine learning) for the last 20 years. Essentially, it's looking at huge sets of data and working out patterns that you can learn from and shape the future of your campaigns.”

Machine learning can shape campaigns for various purposes and KPIs. Greenbids’ algorithms focus on cutting waste from the programmatic supply chain and optimising end-point delivery.

“Every time an ad loads on your phone, that requires energy. In that split second, there's a whole supply chain of different companies who all talk to each other really quickly to decide which ad to show you. In that process, when everyone's talking to each other, there's a lot of wasted conversation or wasted requests between all the different parties. That's wasted energy from a climate point of view, but it's also just wasted money for an advertiser as well.”

“So, what our version of machine learning does is look at every single ad impression and see where there are places that you can trim the waste, and give more money to the advertiser and the publishers. If you cut out a lot of the intermediaries, if you cut out a lot of the wasted ad impressions, you make your campaigns more efficient and effective.”

To learn more about Greenbids’ plans for expansion, Michael’s family of Swifties, and who his dream clients would be, listen to the full episode here. 

You can find the full episode and more on our Life in Digital podcast. To find out more about Greenbids, visit greenbids.ai