Digital out-of-home (DOOH)
Boundaries of measurement
DOOH screens, like consumer devices, require energy to display an ad. Energy consumption during the use phase is in fact the highest source of emissions. However, on the contrary to consumer devices, billboards are owned or leased by media owners who therefore have a high level of operational control over the screen attributes that influence embodied and energy related emissions (venue category, manufacturer, model, size, location and positioning, operating hours, brightness settings etc…). For that reason, we are including emissions from screens’ energy usage and production to “media distribution”.| Emissions source | Lifecycle category | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Screens’ embodied emissions | Media Distribution | In-development |
| Screens’ energy consumption | Media Distribution | Included |
| Corporate emissions | Media Distribution | Included |
| Use of Ad Technology | Ad Selection | In-development |
| Creative data transfers | Creative Distribution | Included |
| Screens’ recycling/disposal | Disposal | To be considered |
Calculating Screens’ embodied emissions
Coming soonCalculating emissions from screens’ energy consumption
On the contrary to consumer device emissions, we have found no credible research paper describing the power draw of large digital billboards. As such, we estimate for individual screens based on a variety of input data sources (listed in order from most accurate to least accurate):- Electricity metres installed on the screens themselves and monitoring power draw in near real-time.
- Power bills received by media owners on a monthly, quaterly or yearly basis, for a group of or for individual screens.
- Technical specifications from screen manufacturers like Daktronics, Samsung or Panasonic. We have found that these often document maximum power draw (instead of average power draw), which can lead to an over-estimation of energy consumption.
- Extrapolation based on physical dimensions and one of the above data point for screens from the same media owner.
- Extrapolation based on physical dimensions and venue type, off the back of data for 500k+ screens kindly provided to us by early partners (including DOOH programmatic platform Hivestack and DOOH media owners JCDecaux ANZ, Go Media and Lumo).