Blockchain technology, and its ever-increasing pace of innovation, has a number of exciting implications for digital advertising. However, the massive growth happening in the Digital Advertising Industry is plagued with obstacles like combatting waste through fraud.
This, among other use cases in the industry, is where Blockchain technology may shine first, and most brightly. Given the security and transparent nature of the technology, combatting fraud seems like a natural initial application for Digital Advertising.
A Complex Problem With a Simple Solution
Advertisers have long been embattled by ad fraud that wastes advertiser dollars through Non-Human Traffic or through the dissemination of malware, and a plethora of third party services aimed to combat this often only add to the supply chain and the fraud problem since the incentives often clash with intentions.
But with no central owner and no single point of failure, making it a digital safe place to record transactions, the immutable ledgers is fully auditable.
In a Blockchained Digital Advertising supply chain you’d be able to check granular statistics on every impression served, where it ran, and whatever available information about who viewed the ad.
The Basic Attention Token - BAT
Basic Attention Token, for example, fundamentally improves the efficiency of digital advertising by acting as the method of exchange between publishers, advertisers, and users that all happens on through the Ethereum Blockchain.
This still young browser blocks ads and trackers that chew up your data and slow down your phone’s performance, all while greedily vacuuming up your private data.
Using protocols that gather anonymized data from the Brave Browser, with private information stored locally on the user’s browser, the platform is able to support an advertising infrastructure that rewards all participants in the ad experience, from publisher to user.
In the transparent digital advertising market BAT would have:
- Publishers can increase revenues through middlemen disintermediation and the reduction of fraud.
- Users who allow ads to show will receive fewer and better quality ads that are far less susceptible to malware.
- Advertisers get more granular detail that makes their Ad Budget go further while helping them shape their brand’s narrative within their demographic/s.
But Brave Brower and BAT are not the only ones working to alter the Digital Advertising landscape.
BitClave – Decentralized Search
In addition to a decentralized browser that pays users in BAT for their attention, a decentralized search engine is also in the works that aims to pay consumers in CAT for their consumer activity.
Currently companies must work through intermediaries, spending vast sums of currency in the hopes of reaching a viable consumer audience. What ends up happening is these become sponsored ads in your search and, for me at least, are ignored as unwelcomed. I’m sure the post mortem reports for many of these campaigns suffer many similar obstacles such as low conversion rates and a flimsy if existent narrative about how the campaign achieved the client’s goal, whether that be conversion or otherwise. In short, they aren’t gaining much insight.
But the offering from BitClave is called BASE (BitClave Active Search Ecosystem) and it is a platform that aims to connect those searching for services or products with those offering them, while incentivizing every participant along the way to grow the base of offerings. Users are even encouraged to set the parameters of what they’re generally in the market for so that they can receive better targeted interactive ads and promotions.
If the user engages with the offering or promotion, they earn CAT. BitClave’s token, called CAT, stands for Consumer Activity Token, and runs on Ethereum.
They’re in control of their data, what kind of advertising they’re interested in, and are appropriately rewarded for their activity. This is the monetary reward that the Googles get, given back to the people who generated the value with their actions in the first place.
Blockchain technology allows every setting and preference of the user to be privatized, so even when they set their preferences to be open for Automobiles, for example, the merchants won’t be getting the user’s name or private data but will still be able to offer them a relevant promotion. If the user connects with that promotion, the merchant issues CAT depending on the level of activity.
The idea is that CAT’s effect on the market could shift power to consumers instead of to the Googles of the world that collect private data to great profit. Even entrepreneurs stand to gain in this kind of environment by being service providers who garner insights and analytics to parse the Blockchain data into actionable intelligence.
The Wild Animals of the Digital Advertising Kingdom
With BATs and CATs making their early marks on the Digital Advertising Industry it’s anyone’s guess which animal will be next. Maybe a “Returned-Attention Token” or RAT?
While it is clear that Digital Advertising continues to ascend to dominance over more traditional forms, the problems of fraud and waste seem to be ascending in parallel. Often considered as ‘the cost of business,’ companies stand to reclaim a substantial portion of fraud and waste budget as Blockchain creep continues throughout society.
It will be interesting to see which major publisher will be the first to explore how Blockchain could help increase their efficiency and reduce the outflow of money through fraud.
Given that A+E Networks has historically been forward thinking in regards to the adoption of digital technology, they may be the first of the pack to give Blockchain a shot. Well before any of the other publishers had apps, A+E was figuring out how to put theirs on more devices and platforms. I could see A+E utilizing BAT to great success to once again be an innovator on the publisher side of Digital Advertising.
Regardless of who claims the title as first, Blockchain technology has proven its worth and that it’s here to stay.
In the future, we users will be receiving a steady stream of rewards for each ad we allow into our personal browsing experience and each search we make. We’ll make more, advertisers will get highly reliable data, and publishers will see a vast reduction in fraud waste.
I'll be able to enjoy social media through Steemit with no ads and when I browse the general internet I'll have BAT compensation for the ads I do allow on my screen, and when I search I'll get CAT compensation in greater amounts dependent on my activity.
The evolving decentralized future-internet is sounding like a pretty good deal so far.
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