The results of Ozone’s 2024 carbon audit, conducted by Green Element, highlight how wide-ranging sustainability initiatives are helping the leading digital advertising business grow fast, scaling smartly and sustainably.
The audit reveals a significant stride towards sustainable growth: while our total carbon footprint increased by 12% year-on-year, reflecting rapid expansion, our normalised results demonstrate remarkable efficiency in scaling operations. The report clearly shows Ozone is effectively decoupling business growth from emissions growth.
Key positive outcomes from the 2024 audit
- A 14% drop in tCO2e per billion ad requests.
- A 13% drop in tCO2e per £m billings.
- A 22% reduction in tCO2e per FTE, even with 17 new employees joining in 2024.
These figures underscore how Ozone is not only growing rapidly but is doing so in an increasingly carbon-efficient manner.
We are firmly on track with our ambitious 2030 reduction targets, committed to a 42% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions (gas and electricity). A key contributor to our Scope 2 reductions shown in the chart below, was the strategic decision to move our Manchester office space to a location powered entirely by renewable energy.
For Scope 3 emissions (all other indirect emissions), as shown in the following chart, we are targeting a 52% reduction, with continued optimisation efforts from our Product, Engineering & Development team contributing significantly to these year-on-year reductions.
This positive trajectory demonstrates our dedication to achieving our long-term environmental goals.
The expert view
Daniel Crockatt, Senior Climate Analyst, Green Element
“Ozone has made great progress in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions over the past year, with most areas of the business seeing year-on-year reductions. Even as the company continues to grow, its normalised emissions show a clear drop in intensity, a strong sign that its reduction strategies are working and that sustainability is becoming deeply embedded across the business.
It’s also encouraging to see that Ozone is tracking well below its Near-Term targets across all scopes, aligned to the Science Based Targets initiative, showing real leadership in balancing growth with meaningful climate action.”
Embedding sustainability across Ozone
Acting sustainably is fundamental to our approach and part of everything we do. We champion active lifestyles through employee initiatives, including our YuLife and Vitality partnerships, and our cycle-to-work scheme. We offer employees greener travel alternatives through an electric vehicle purchase programme.
Additionally, this dedication to sustainability is central to our technology and marketing endeavours. Wherever possible, hardware such as laptops and mobile phones purchased for employees will be refurbished rather than new. Our marketing materials and merchandise, including printed collateral, pens, notepads, and other branded products, are sourced via our sustainably focused partner, PinkSheep.
Crucially, our Product, Engineering & Data team is dedicated to sustainable operations. As a digital advertising business, our digital operational costs are our biggest contributor to carbon emissions. To address this, in 2024, the team took significant steps:
- They relocated servers closer to users, thereby cutting processing costs associated with unnecessary global bid request shipments.
- They developed and launched optimisations and other compression modification technology to improve data pipeline efficiency, reducing bandwidth.
- They improved data formatting with robust quality control to keep data storage costs as low as possible.
The Ozone view
Kirsty Spencer, Head of Business Programmes, Ozone
“While the majority of Ozone’s carbon emissions come from the delivery of programmatic digital advertising and the associated processing power needed for our data and technology, we continue to pour a huge amount of energy into operating as sustainably as possible. We’re truly proud of our ongoing sustainability efforts, and these latest results are testament to the work we do.
At Ozone, we put sustainability front and centre. From individual employee contributions to the initiatives spearheaded by our teams. For example, Finance has ramped up our procurement of refurbished, rather than new, hardware, and our Product, Engineering & Data teams are intensely focused on creating optimisations and technology that reduce the emissions generated by our digital operations – even as the business grows exponentially.”
More about Ozone sustainability
A detailed synopsis of our ECOzone sustainability programme, first published in August 2024, is available to download and read here. The synopsis was published to coincide with the launch of our ECOzone for publishers and ECOzone campaign measurement solution for advertisers.
