These days it seems like there are new tech scandals every day, such as privacy breaches by tech giants, smartphone applications being exploited to perform ad frauds and then there is the completely general stuff that users expect to happen regularly, that is getting tracked by invasive cookies and pixels martech.
Ad fraud is a very expensive issue that is estimated to cost advertisers more than $50 billion per year. Let’s be honest, if you are paying for ads, you are being ripped off. This is happening due to the system is inherently uncertain and money of advertisers ends up being spent primarily on the costly mediator and secondly on ad fraud, not the real human viewers they wanted to be spending money on. Till now, this has been the status quo for online advertising, with no one making any big moves to really tackle ad fraud. Blockchain in Advertising can play a significant role in various functions of advertisements.
Being candor, suddenly you might be feeling like blockchain is everywhere, from finance to media and advertising, everywhere.
Can blockchain in advertising fix problems of digital advertising?
Adbank is an adtech startup building a blockchain-based advertising solution to tackle the extra markups in the advertising industry and the $ 50 billion ad fraud problems. Utilizing blockchain technology, payment protocols of adbanks give complete transparency of transactions between publishers and advertisers while developing a new cryptocurrency-based ecosystem that detects and decreases fraud at scale.
What about the end-user in digital advertising?
Recognize the importance of users in the advertising ecosystem, adbank is now rolling out the unique, an ad-blocking browser extension that rewards users for viewing advertisements. Sounds impossible? It is pretty ingenious once you hear the method in which it works. BLADE facilitates the active participation of users by rewarding them with adbank’s cryptocurrency ADB when they see an ad.
With the built-in transparency of blockchain, adbank is capable of detecting and mitigating ad fraud, stopping funds of advertisers from going to bot traffic. Even better, with BLADE, the advertisements are published in the browsers of the user instead of the site, so spoof domains and fake bot traffic are no longer a threat to advertisers. Advertisers don’t have to worry about crazy high cost per click (CPC) on high-end sites, they just pay to run a campaign on BLADE and follow the user around in their browser wherever they go.
Users like BLADE too, their data is secured and they get rewarded in ADB for their attention. Adbank didn’t forget the publishers, they get a cut of the ad spending of the advertisers and BLADE automatically collects their rewards. The only thing publishers need to do is to log in and claim their rewards.
Adfraud might seem like an issue only for those in the advertising industry, but the solution may be developing a suitable ecosystem between publishers, advertisers, and users. Only when the ecosystem begins to respect user’s privacy and attention can the ecosystem of advertising truly function.
Use of Blockchain in Advertising
Monetization:
In the year 2017, Decent, a blockchain content distribution platform launched Publiq, a rewarding process that le’s content creators and writers distribute content on the blockchain and get paid instantly.
Advanced TV
The advanced advertising group of Comcast developed a new technology that allows brands to make ad purchase on both broadcast and OTT TV utilizing blockchain technology. In 2018, the group that brought together Disnet, Altice USA, Channel 4 of the U.K. and TG1 group of Italy, plans to let marketing professionals, publishers and programmers share data without having to pool it in any place. A CPG marketer would be able to utilize data from a content creator like Hulu to understand how much to target its ad purchase without receiving the actual data.
Ad Buying
New York Interactive Advertising Exchange, which is a marketplace where publishers, agencies, and brands can purchase and sell future ad inventory in partnership with Nasdaq was launched in 2017. The idea is to automate the execution of the contract as long as conditions are met. In the first place, it plans to support only digital ad buys.
Fraud
In June 2017, Data & Marketing Association and MetaX launched an open protocol, adChain on the Ethereum blockchain that tags a piece of creative and follows it on the internet to confirm that someone views it, deciding who it was and what actions were taken after that. Like the approach of Comcast, adChain allows multiple parts of the industry, from agency to publisher to marketing professionals, to work together without dependency.
Whitelisting
MetaX also operates an adChain registry in association with the DMA and ConsenSys that utilizes cryptocurrency called adTocken, which incentivizes individuals to make a decision whether a publisher can be whitelisted or not. Brands can then choose to spend only on those publishers.
Future of blockchain in advertising
Advertising organizations are starting to develop a real use case of blockchain in their regular activities and those who get ahead of the curve will have a great benefit very soon. Blockchain is the optimum democratization tool, and while those who presently protect the status quo are right to be afraid, at some point every individual will realize that an open system makes as may opportunities as it takes away.
Instead of predicting the future, fast movers are making it happen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.