Billboards

Young alleges that a 14 by 48 LED digital billboard uses 162,902 kwh annually which if true means that a digital sign would use 15 times the electricity of an average home.   This statement is wildly in error.

14 by 48 digital signs produced by Daktronics, Formetco or Watchfire use approximately 24,000 kwh of electricity a year or about one-seventh the power use that Young alleges.    So a typical digital sign uses 2 times the power of an average US home and 2 times as much power as a static billboard.

Many cities are requiring that 2-4 static faces must be taken down for every digital face which is built so a digital conversion actually cuts power consumption.

UK spending on advertising almost doubled between 2010 and 2019 and, after a pandemic dip, the £23bn spend for 2020 is expected to rise by 15% in 2021.

Even worse, findings from neuroscience reveal that advertising goes as far as lodging itself in the brain, rewiring it by forming physical structures and causing permanent change.

Brands that have been made familiar through advertising have a strong influence on the choices people make. Under MRI scans, the logos of recognisable car brands are shown to activate a single, particular region of the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex.

That’s bad enough for adults, but children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.

In 2018 the car sector is estimated to have spent more than $35.5bn on advertising in key markets globally, roughly equal to the annual income of a country like Bolivia. And, in recent years, advertising has pushed a major shift to people buying larger, more polluting SUVs.

Tackling “brain pollution” requires action equivalent to the campaign to end tobacco advertising. New checks and balances need to accommodate the natural concerns of councils and residents around climate, air pollution, environmental light pollution, the “attention economy”, mental health and the dominance of non-consensual adverts in public spaces.

The calculator shows that a typical online ad campaign would emit 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide – which is close to being under half (43%) of the average annual carbon footprint of a person in the UK.

How a typical online ad campaign might cost the earth 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide: According to the IAB, a billboard banner that is 970 by 250 pixels weighs up to 600 kilobytes in data. In the UK, the electricity to emissions conversation rate is 2556 gCO₂eq/kWh, based on data from The Electricty Map If we assume the total campaign spend is £100,000 and inventory costs a cost-per-thousand of £5, the campaign would deliver 20 million impressions Based on this data, the calculator reports that the campaign would emit 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide Williams added that off-setting carbon emissions costs £3.70 per tonne and invited Mediatel News readers to consider off-setting initiatives listed by the non-profit group Project Drawdown. This would mean the cost of off-setting is £19.98, or just 0.02% of the total campaign budget.

Seven in 10 people working in the UK ad industry (71%) are worried about the negative impact the industry has on the environment, Ad Net Zero has said, while 80% of UK consumers agree that “companies should be doing more to be sustainable”

After a recent application to install a double-sided digital advert screen in Central Bristol, we discovered that the unit would use more electricity to power for a full year than 4 homes!

According to the technical specification submitted as part of the planning application, the maximum consumption of this double-sided unit uses up to 1920W of electricity, or 16,819 kWh for a full year of operation. Digital advertising screens are illuminated year-round and through the night.

For our calculations, we have used the highest figure which is from Ovo, and estimates an average UK household electricity consumption of 3760 kWh per year.

Therefore, a year of operation at the typical level would use 41,000 kWh of electricity: more than 11 UK households. The maximum potential electricity wasted by this development – if it was running for a full year at maximum output – would be 138,758 kWh… more than enough to power 36 homes!

Outdoor or out-of-home (OOH) ads are modernizing, ditching static paper and paste formats for ever-changing illuminating digital screens.

Media owners are locked in an upgrade race, but with climate crisis anxiety heating up, is the sector’s savior tech compatible with the sustainability needs of society?

One 2010 study claimed a 48-sheet digital billboard (6.096m x 3.048m) consumes about 30 times more energy than the average American household in a year.

2019 research from Adblock Bristol showed that a much smaller but double-sided digital freestanding unit from Clear Channel used more electricity than four homes each year.

Meanwhile, a large JC Decaux billboard was found to consume the equivalent of 36 homes “if it was running for a full year at maximum output.” These are thirsty machines.

86 digital out-of-home (DOOH) boards in Manchester city center each use an average of 11,501kWh of electricity every year. That’s roughly 345 households’ worth. But these units deliver £2.4m a year in rent, plus 2.8% of the revenue from each ad. That’s well in excess of £6,956 per ‘household.’

UK OOH, issues a defense saying media owners have been seriously reducing their carbon impact, prioritizing energy-efficient suppliers and supply chains, buying renewable energy and offsetting carbon. Anything from adopting non-fossil fuel fleets to ditching plastic coffee cups is on the table.

Research from Cavai estimates that the average online ad impression emits the same amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere as driving an electric car between 0.4 to 9.65m, watching a 40 inch $K OLED TV between 1.5 to 35 seconds, or having a LED light bulb on between 30 and 700 seconds.

The energy consumption of a single impression is between 0.14Wh and 1.93Wh.

Meanwhile, Ovo estimates the average annual UK household electricity consumption sits at 3,760,000Wh per year, the equivalent of a mere 26,857,142 ad impressions.

That’s a lot of online impressions. Furthermore, advertising likely added an extra 28% to the annual carbon footprint of every single person in the UK in 2019.

“On a ‘carbon-impact-per-ad-served’ basis OOH is an incredibly low-impact advertising medium because every OOH ad is seen by thousands of people.”

As an extreme example, London’s Piccadilly Lights reaches more than 56 million people a year. The energy costs will be extremely high, but how many individual screens would advertisers would have to render ads on to reach all those people individually?

One study claims that a 14×48m digital billboard with LED bulbs uses only twice as much power as a static billboard, and adds that LED lights use about 75% less energy than incandescent bulbs (although you need way more of them). Other studies have digital using as much as 13 times more energy.

Also on the horizon are more efficient LED lighting and solar panels, as well as fleets of electric vehicles, pollinator-friendly infrastructure ‘living roofs’ and CO2 scrubbers to improve air quality.

DOOH is compatible with sustainability.

Last spring, the paper’s Driven to Distraction series explored the potential risks of digital billboards, which critics sometimes refer to as “TV on a stick.”

In a year, a digital billboard can consume up to 30 times the energy that an average American home uses

There is, of course, a partial solution: if you use electricity generated from solar panels to power the display, a digital billboard can be rendered carbon-neutral in terms of the emissions it generates. A billboard in Times Square operates this way.