It is not often that you hear revenue growth and sustainability in the same sentence — and even rarer that your department strategy could play an essential role in the global environmental conversation. 

To meet our clients’ needs and expectations, The Irish Times is constantly looking at ways to improve our offerings — and introducing new, innovative products for our advertisers is central to this. Although revenue growth is key when discussing new products, we also had another element informing the direction of our product development: sustainability.  

In recent years, sustainability has become a key tenet that has guided our business and seen us actively adopt practices to reduce our carbon footprint as a company.  The introduction of a new video product allowed the Irish Times Group to elevate its commitment to sustainability to the next level.  

The problem with the Internet 

The Internet represents at least 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, putting it on par with the aviation industry. The media industry heavily contributes to this figure, with the data needed to deliver digital ads generating a large portion of our CO2 footprint. 

With its ground-breaking adaptive streaming technology, SeenThis is transforming both digital content’s distribution and climate impact. Adaptive streaming splits the image/video into smaller segments and streams segments only when the image or video is in view, thus avoiding unnecessary data transfer. Partnering with SeenThis has allowed us to offer new innovative video formats to clients with the added benefit of reducing our data usage. 

This game-changing technology enabled us to offer HD video formats which are streamed rather than downloaded giving a multitude of client and media benefits, including instant loading creative, no buffering regardless of the user’s Internet connection, improved completion rates, and higher engagement of digital display assets.    

The formats have made an impact on our climate-conscious advertisers and readers alike. 

Green innovation

We launched our first new format, Stream, in March 2021 on breakingnews.ie and then across the Group by June 2021.  

Listening to our clients’ needs and feedback, we quickly moved to the second phase and introduced four additional video formats. This gave us new solutions for direct response briefs and we were able to integrate shopping carts. We also offered multiple product placements and more ways for brands to engage and interact with our audiences.  

Video innovation is central to our digital strategy and the green credentials that these formats bring have given us a new talking point. Our next phase of this partnership is exciting, and we plan on bringing this technology further.

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