In his final end-of-month column for this year, New Digital Age’s editor Michael Feeley asks whether, in the stampede towards AI, the digital marketing industry’s much-trumpeted commitment to sustainability is being quietly swept under the carpet…
So, we’ve reached the end of November 2025, which seems a bit quick doesn’t it?! I’m lucky enough to be on holiday for the last few weeks of December, so this will be the last edition of my monthly musings for this year.
In summing up my overall impressions of the year, I could maybe mention the continuing growth of the retail media sector or discuss how the independent agency sector is flourishing around the globe but, the truth is, 2025 has been dominated by one topic: the use of generative AI.
As a journalist with three decades of experience, I’m used to an ‘issue of the day’ dominating my inbox, whether it’s cookie deprecation, personalisation, dynamic creative or whatever. As recently as 18 months ago, all anyone seemed to want to talk about was sustainability and supply path optimisation. It was essential, I was told by countless senior players, to reduce the enormous number of murky microtransactions involved in programmatic ad trading, thereby reducing the impact of the global ad industry on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Today, however, you’d be lucky to find any mention of carbon calculators for ad campaigns or green media planning frameworks in my inbox. Instead, it feels like the entire industry’s discourse has switched to AI and the potential speed, automation, productivity, operational savings and creative optimisation it could potentially help to deliver.
The result? From my perspective at least, ‘sustainability’ has fallen almost entirely off of the industry’s radar in less than a year.
What’s more traditional “ad carbon calculators” have been built to measure display, video, and programmatic, not generative AI or agentic systems running continuously. It may be that conversations on sustainability have stalled partly because we lack tools to measure the new footprint, but I fear that, as an industry, the lure of the shiny next-big-thing has all us caught up in a mad fever dream, where we honestly believe that technology will take care of all our problems, as if by magic, with no downside at all.
The truth is that AI-driven marketing is actually increasing digital waste dramatically. From thousands of unused creative variants sitting in servers, to hyper-targeting increasing data processing and auctions, we’re currently automating inefficiency at scale. What’s more, AI datacentres require a huge amount of water to keep their servers cool, which comes with a whole new range of environmental dangers, including the concentration of contaminants in the used water.
I’ve read several reports in recent weeks that governments in the UK, fearful of missing out on the AI boom, are now considering offering AI datacentres cheaper rates of electricity than those available to other sorts of businesses. This doesn’t strike me as being in line with our country’s green aspirations.
Perhaps then, in 2026, we should all be less passive in wondering where AI might take us and more proscriptive about where exactly it is we want to go.
