In his first column for ExchangeWire,  Paul Evans, Founder and Chief Positioning Engineer, V2RSION, looks at why sustainability has seemingly been pushed into ad tech’s background…

In early June, Scope3 sold its ad verification business, Adloox, to Peer39. The deal made a small "blip" in the trade press and was reported neutrally. 

Eighteen months earlier, Scope3 had bought Adloox with an explicit purpose: to combine verification with carbon measurement, and strip out wasted inventory such as invalid traffic and made-for-advertising sites at the point of the trade. The acquisition was more than a strategically sound move - it was an ambitious attempt to put environmental accountability inside the definition of media quality itself. 

The business now describes the divestiture as "the right move" because it is "hyper focused on…facilitating agentic media buying." That is one ad tech company's decision. The trend that sits behind it is much bigger.

The pivot is not just at Scope3

Let’s look at some themes happening right now…

The consensus from La Croisette in Cannes this year is that agentic is the future. Nvidia, Yahoo, Palantir, Pinterest, and Fox had each unveiled foundational infrastructure for agent-to-agent advertising during the festival. Sustainability barely featured at Cannes.

Liam Brennan, a respected media consultant who has worked on sustainability initiatives at the Responsible Marketing Advisory, posted his own observation on LinkedIn: "Yesterday I opened LinkedIn and saw multiple videos of people arriving in Cannes by helicopter. Just a few years ago people highlighted how they took the train or at least paid to carbon offset their flights." Brennan continues: "Advertising is an industry that loves the new, the next and the shiny. Sometimes we move on from topics before we've solved them."

The IAB Europe 2026 State of Readiness report describes what we are watching as a sector "entering a new era of sustainability" by "widening focus beyond carbon." But the numbers underneath that framing tell a different story. The share of respondents reporting their digital ad supply chain ESG impact within corporate disclosures has dropped by nine percentage points since 2025. 

AI content ingestion now leads the 2026 ecosystem agenda for ad tech, agencies and advertisers at 60%. Environmental sustainability sits in fifth place at 28%, behind economic concerns, measurement, and ad fraud. Only a third of respondents share any ESG impact data with clients.

The pattern repeats in the work itself. The Sustainable Behaviours Ad Tracker, run by Ad Net Zero, the Advertising Association, and Kantar, reports that just 4.3% of ads currently feature sustainable behaviours, down from 6.1% in the tracker's first report in April 2025. That is a fall of nearly a third in just over a year. 

All of this is happening as Ad Net Zero has released v1.3 of its Global Media Sustainability Framework, which now covers 95% of global media spend. The tools are getting better. The impact is going backwards.

We have done this before, but this time is different

We have been here before. Supply chain transparency had its year. DE&I had its run. Each was announced as a permanent industry requirement, supported by panels, white papers, and confident keynote commitments. Each receded as soon as the next positioning and commercial opportunity came along.

Laura Wade, sustainability lead at ISBA, said as much on a recent ExchangeWire interview. "As an industry we have some cognitive dissonance going on. We have taken our eye off the ball and moved on to other topics, and moved away from advocating for sustainability. We have an actions value gap."

AI is the latest transition, and it is different. Agentic media buying is a real structural shift, the kind that does reorganise what an industry sells and how it sells it. But choosing it over sustainability commits the industry to a technology whose own carbon load is rising, not falling. 

Amazon, which runs both Amazon DSP and much of the cloud infrastructure serving AI advertising at scale, reported greenhouse gas emissions of 80.8 million tonnes in 2025, up from 69.5 million the year before. That was its second consecutive annual increase. The company acknowledged that its expanding AI infrastructure is complicating its own net-zero pledge.

Doing the right thing vs the right to do something

I completed the Cambridge University Business Sustainability Course in 2023 because I felt ignorant of the facts and wanted to play a part in improving the way our industry worked. In the time since, exactly one client has asked me to apply any of that knowledge through the positioning work I undertake at V2RSION. Just one. That is not a comment on my clients. It is a comment on the demand environment. Sustainability has stopped being something buyers pull for, and the supply side has adjusted accordingly.

None of this means the work itself has stopped. Ad Net Zero, the Conscious Advertising Network, ISBA, the Responsible Marketing Advisory, and others continue to build the frameworks and toolkits the category was always going to need. This is not a call to keep selling sustainability because it is commercially rewarding, or because the client base is asking for it. It is not. The call is to keep building these capabilities because an industry that earns the trust of the people who pay for it is not built by dropping every imperative as soon as the next narrative arrives.

Supply chain transparency mattered. DE&I matters. Carbon accountability inside the media buy matters. These are standards, not preferences. They should be expectations for the work. It does not stop being the work when the agenda changes. There are things that are simply the right things to do.