Advertising Week Q&A: Michael Hanbury-Williams, Managing Director UK, Greenbids

Advertising Week sat down with Michael Hanbury-Williams, Managing Director UK at Greenbids to discuss his role, the challenges facing advertisers, and AI’s role in it all.

By R. Larsson, Advertising Week

Why did you join Greenbids and what sets the company apart from others in the space?

Greenbids was the perfect opportunity to combine two things I’m really passionate about: media and sustainability. I spent years wanting to play a more active role in pushing the industry towards real change and, at Greenbids, I get to do it from the inside.

When I was at Universal McCann, I worked with Greenbids for 18 months as a client, and I was genuinely blown away. They weren’t just another tech partner, they completely exceeded my expectations. Greenbids proved, time and again, in hard numbers, that you can have media that’s both effective and sustainable. It was a no-brainer for me to join them.

What sets Greenbids apart is that it doesn’t just talk the talk. There’s a real mission here to make advertising work better for both brands and the planet. It’s rare to find a company that delivers on performance without compromising on purpose, and that’s what makes Greenbids different. We’re proving that you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

What do you see as the greatest challenge for advertisers and agencies right now?

The industry is tangled in its own complexity. Programmatic advertising is a mess of inefficient processes and it’s dragging the entire ecosystem further from both its performance and sustainability goals. The more convoluted it gets, the more emissions we see — and not enough is being done to fix the root cause because too many people just want to see the numbers go up.

There’s also a misplaced focus on measurement. Sure, it’s important, but it’s not the end game. So many in the industry are stuck ticking boxes, thinking that tracking carbon equals progress – all while passing the buck along the supply chain. The way we’re buying media is fundamentally broken, and focusing on individual campaigns without addressing the system as a whole is like putting a plaster on a broken leg.

Until we start streamlining how media is bought and traded, the industry will keep running in circles. It’s time to cut through the clutter and make meaningful change. It will be difficult, and true supply chain optimisation will mean sidestepping some intermediaries, but we can’t let their presence prevent the entire ecosystem from advancing.

How does AI help solve for this?

AI is the key to untangling this mess. At Greenbids, we’re using AI to make advertising both more efficient and greener across the entire value chain – from advertisers and SSPs to publishers. The programmatic world is full of wasted ad calls; 90% of them don’t even convert, which is just burning through energy and resources.

With AI, we can predict which ad calls are likely to succeed and cut out the ones that won’t. This not only makes campaigns more efficient, but significantly reduces carbon emissions. For example, our partnership with Equativ has already cut emissions in early trials by 40%, and we’re only just getting started.

What we’re doing is using AI to achieve three things at the same time: better results for advertisers, more money to publishers, and also fewer emissions for the planet. It’s a smarter, cleaner way to run campaigns, and it provides this industry with a rare opportunity to decarbonise while improving efficiency and profitability.

What about publishers? How does Greenbids support them?

Publishers are both benefactors of our work and part of the solution. The programmatic chain is tough on publishers: they’re processing far too many useless ad calls, which is hitting their servers and cranking up energy use. We help by predicting which ad calls are a waste of time and cutting them out before they cause problems.

By reducing that server load, publishers lower their energy consumption and, by extension, their carbon emissions. But there’s more to it than just going green, publishers also stand to gain financially, and there’s also benefits from a Core Web Vitals point of view. By cutting out wasted ad calls and ad tech partners you speed up overall page load times – which, in turn, boosts SEO rankings, leading to improved traffic and more revenue. It’s a win-win. Then there’s the wider point that more brands and agencies are looking to invest in sustainable media, and so those who embrace carbon reduction will be the ones capturing that spend.

It’s not just about doing the right thing for the environment; for carbon reduction to be embraced, it must be a business opportunity as well. Publishers who lead the charge can improve efficiency, increase revenue, and position themselves as leaders in sustainable media. We’re here to help them do exactly that.

What’s your biggest prediction for the media industry?

The clock’s ticking on Net Zero. Once the business case for sustainability becomes impossible to ignore, we’re going to see a huge shift. Companies that don’t embrace AI-optimised, sustainable campaigns will be left behind. It’s simple: when people realise that performance and sustainability go hand in hand, everyone will follow the money — and that money is moving towards cleaner, more efficient media.

The future’s coming fast, and those who don’t get on board will be left in the dust. We see Greenbids like a canary in the coal mine: if we don’t succeed, the whole industry is in trouble.