In case you hadn’t noticed, we are in something of a crisis, climate-wise. I’ll spare you the details, but the human race does seem to be racing headlong towards a self-made extinction that seems a little unnecessary.

But at least you’re not making it that much worse, are you? After all, you just make ads. That’s not exactly running a power station or building an oil rig, is it? True, but you may be using a lot more unnecessary energy than you think.

Let’s start at the beginning: the concepting stage. Google searches aren’t too bad, but you’ve probably moved on to ChatGPT now, and those interactions, which scrape their information from much more of the internet, consume 25 times more energy. Beyond that, 20-50 ChatGPT enquiries also require a litre of valuable water to cool its servers.

Then there are the Midjourney/Leonardo/Dall-E images you’ll need for the many, many decks that are now required for any creative development. When added to the verbal explorations, generative AI is now using the same amount of energy as Argentina, and predicted to use 8% of all US power by 2030, along with four times the water use of Denmark. Google alone is predicted to surpass the water use of the UK by 2027.

But at least you’re not making it that much worse, are you? After all, you just make ads. That’s not exactly running a power station or building an oil rig, is it?

And let’s not forget the energy usage that comes from that essential search for inspiration on YouTube/TikTok/Netflix. Of course, it’s not all for the creative development of ad campaigns, but by some estimations YouTube already uses 1% of all global power.

If you find anything good and need to send it to anyone as reference, you’ll also be adding to the problem. Again, it’s down to the running of an enormous number of data centres, but email is estimated to take up another 0.3% of global energy use, with large attachments making each message that much more onerous.

Once you’re past the endless back-and-forth of the client stage, you might be given a green light to begin production. That means more decks going off to potential directors, and more decks coming back in the form of their treatments. They’ll use plenty of film and imagery, almost all of which is stored in some kind of cloud, requiring more data centres, more energy and more water.

Each production company will also need to budget for several locations, all but one of which will be unused, just to make sure the client’s procurement department can be satisfied that ‘due diligence’ has been observed.

If you find anything good and need to send it to anyone as reference, you’ll also be adding to the problem. Email is estimated to take up another 0.3% of global energy use

Sure, that’s a lot of bad news, but it’s nothing compared to the resource costs of the production itself. If you decide to write some kind of location into your script that requires a flight, AdGreen estimates that your use of British Airways will end up becoming 60-90% of your production’s carbon emissions.

Even if you don’t make a deliberate attempt to go abroad, unpredictable weather, the strength of the pound and cheaper production in other locations might mean you end up in South Africa, Prague or Uruguay. And before you settle into the lounge with a G&T, it’s worth bearing in mind that a business class journey uses three times as much carbon as economy.

You could minimise the number of people travelling, but that’s rarely a creative call. Extra clients, along with the requisite account managers to ‘babysit’ them will make your shoot more annoying, while also making the planet a little hotter.

Of course, the shoot itself will usually have carbon-intensive red meat options, plenty of wastage, and a depressing number of plastic bottles, as well as further transport to and from the hotel.

Of course, the shoot itself will usually have carbon-intensive red meat options, plenty of wastage, and a depressing number of plastic bottles

Then there’s the hard drives. Every shoot now involves the use of many brand-new hard drives because many think that insurance won’t cover the contents of re-used ones (completely untrue). The production company will use one to store the day’s footage, but by the end of the process that footage will also be stored indefinitely by the agency and post-production facilities, just in case a new edit is required six months down the line.

Speaking of post-production, that’s where even more energy and server usage is required, as so much work is also stored in the cloud. Every time you or the client decide that the last bit of CG wasn’t quite right, it will have to be regenerated and, crucially, re-rendered. That takes time, along with lots and lots of carbon.

I remember the first time I saw an art director produce a list of tiny on-screen imperfections that would need to be cleaned up in post (how did we cope with such violations in the ‘old’ days?). That is a lot of work and a lot of energy for something that is often seen at the size of a Post-it note on a phone.

When the ad is finally finished, it will have to be versioned out, perhaps 200-300 times, to take into account the different sizes, dimensions, platforms and definitions that are now the default requirements for any 2024 ad campaign. Sadly, research has shown that up to 80% of these digital placements will never be seen.

Start by asking questions: do we need all these decks/versions/clients? And when someone answers in the affirmative, explain what the invisible costs might be

Even after the ads have (or haven’t) found their audience, there is a near-future probability that your ads will then be evaluated by generative AI to hone them to someone’s idea of perfection. More resources used in the pursuit of tiny possible improvements to the effectiveness of a communication on behalf of a company that used to manage perfectly well without all this assistance.

So that’s your process: sucking in and spewing out resources every step of the way. But now that you are aware of the problem, what can you do about it?

Start by asking questions: do we need all these decks/versions/clients? And when someone answers in the affirmative, explain what the invisible costs might be. It might take many conversations to move the needle back in the other direction, but if people don’t know there’s a problem, they won’t attempt to look for a solution. And now that you know where the problems lie, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

Based in Los Angeles, Ben Kay is a creative director and copywriter, and advertising columnist for CR; ben-kay.com; Top image: Shutterstock