Nexd Joins Ad Net Zero Australia

Nexd has joined the Australian chapter of Ad Net Zero, the industry’s push to take carbon out of advertising.

The timing is good. Australia now requires companies to report their emissions. That includes the carbon from their advertising. And this is where Nexd does something most platforms don’t.

Renewable energy is the floor, not the win

Lots of platforms run on renewable energy now. So do we. Our ad serving is certified by the Green Web Foundation to run fully on renewable energy, and every one of our customers’ ads is served on 100% renewable energy.

But green energy only answers one question: where the power comes from. It says nothing about how much power you burn. A heavy ad on clean energy is still a heavy ad. The data still has to move, and across billions of impressions that adds up fast.

The real win is using less energy in the first place. Most of the industry skips that part. We built our product around it.

Lighter ads, by design

Nexd builds interactive ads on WebGL. They weigh a fraction of standard HTML5 rich media. Our video creatives run 83% lighter. Our image ads run 41% lighter. They also render on the GPU, not the CPU, so they load faster and use about 30% fewer resources.

Lighter ads move less data. Less data burns less energy on every impression. The numbers are real. A video campaign of 100 million impressions in the UK puts out around 4 tonnes of CO₂ on standard ad serving. On Nexd, it’s about 1.5 tonnes.

So Nexd cuts emissions twice. First we cut the weight, so the ad needs less energy to deliver. Then we serve it on renewable energy. Lower the demand, then clean the supply. That order is the whole point.

This is not new for us. We’ve spent over 10 years making digital ads more efficient, and we’ve saved more than 10 million kg of CO₂ doing it. Joining Ad Net Zero helps us take that further.

You can read the full breakdown of how we calculate this in how Nexd ensures sustainable ad serving, or see the wider picture on our sustainability page.

Why this matters in Australia right now

Australia has made climate reporting mandatory. The biggest companies report first. Medium and smaller ones follow over the next few years. The rules cover Scope 3 emissions too, the indirect carbon across a company’s whole value chain.

Advertising lives inside that Scope 3 footprint. So as the rules tighten, brands and their agencies will have to measure the carbon their campaigns create. A renewable energy badge won’t be enough.

Here’s the practical part. Lighter ads cut the emissions a brand has to account for. And the reporting comes built in. Nexd calculates creative emissions savings using the Scope3 methodology, the industry standard for measuring carbon across the ad supply chain. You get campaign-level CO₂ numbers that are credible and comparable, ready the moment you need to report. No scrambling after the fact.

Lower emissions, and a solid record of them, baked into the campaign.

Rolling up our sleeves with Ad Net Zero

Ad Net Zero Australia brings advertisers, agencies and media owners together to cut the carbon out of advertising. Its working groups shape the standards the market will actually use. That’s where we want to be.

Gavin Smith, our Country Manager for Australia, is leading the charge. He’s joining the Reducing Media Emissions working group and helping write an upcoming guide on doing exactly that. It’s a natural fit. Measuring and slashing ad emissions is what we built Nexd to do.