Advertising is a billion dollar industry. Businesses in the modern age are faced with a decision to either hop on the train of mass hysteria advertising or stick to their guns of limited reach. The advent of behemoth middle men such as Facebook, Google and Amazon has skyrocketed the value of online advertising. Value in this context means these middlemen get to smile at the bank whether or not businesses who use their services achieve their marketing goal.
The value chain of goods and services have also taken a hit as the more businesses pay for ads, the higher the cost of final goods and services. Which means consumers get to pay more for less value.
This vicious cycle makes the case of online advertising an interesting one. The seller-consumer dynamism in online advertising does not favor businesses as they do not have access to consumer’s behavioral data and cannot separate those that are interested in their goods or services from those that aren’t. Regulatory standards even make the process more stringent as Middlemen face legal action from consumer privacy violation scenarios.
The year 2015, saw an estimated $170.5 billion spent on online advertising globally. This figure is projected to increase by 50% in 2018.
Is this growth a two way street? Does online advertising really convert for its proponents?
- CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Customer relationship is the core to sustained growth and relevance. Many enterprises seek to build and improve upon customer relationship as brands now recognize the need to adopt and utilize a more human side to their business operations.
The key to long term business success is to implement Customer Relationship Management in your business which contributes to customer retention. What does this mean? Basically, it means that your goal should be to change one time transactions into repeat transactions with long-term customers, and this involves developing and maintaining strong relationships with your customers so they remain loyal to you.
Businesses have a customer relationship problem— they fail to build direct and significant relationships with their most valuable customers.
They budget millions for Marketing Technologies (MarTech) to find customers but don’t prioritize the need to create a dialog with them.
They confuse a customer record in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System with a relationship – Fatal mistake.
And, in an effort to play relationship catch-up, businesses have become hooked on the third-party information sold by data brokers and middlemen.
SOLUTION
One of the core ideologies of blockchain is the secured decentralization of public, verifiable ledgers. Blockchain is a growing initiative but its sprout is headed towards the right direction by focusing on the return of user date to consumers – thus, eliminating the need for middlemen and data brokers. A typical example is BitClave, which seeks to eliminate middlemen and create a more effective and direct connection between businesses and customers.
By adopting a user-controlled data system, consumers can secure their identity data on their terms – revealing what they choose to reveal and companies within the blockchain ecosystem can take their wares to the forefront with direct advertisements through incentive programs and smarter matchmaking.
Improving customer relationships takes time— but as an independent two-sided market place BitClave accelerates trust building. In contrast to treating consumer information as a commodity. BitClave’s decentralized system is transparently structured to benefit the customer and the businesses: data brokerage.
According to the project’s whitepaper, “the rewarding mechanism works the following way: the customer and retailer are facing software interact. The customer publishes a unique confirmation (Proof-of-View) that he/she viewed the offer and the business verifies that the confirmation corresponds to the correct offer. A confirmed view event will trigger CAT reward from retailer to customer for viewing the offer.
- FAKE TRAFFIC VERSUS REAL TRAFFIC
Department store magnate John Wanamaker famously said: “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”
The objective of advertising is getting your products and services in front of your audience target. Traditional marketing involved the use of print newspapers, televisions, magazines and more to achieve consumer outreach. Most firms that used traditional advertising methods could not tell for sure how many people could view their advert, the leads generated from the adverts and feedbacks on how to modify their services.
When advertising went digital, these problems were thought to be a thing of the past but the situation is even more complex. The fact that activities on the internet can be tracked also presents a new case of numerous variables and which supersedes the other in terms of online advertising efficiency. What should businesses be measuring? Clicks? Monthly visitors? Time spent on the page? The middlemen who get paid to advertise and target audiences are still stuck on the “page views” and “visitors” ideology – which does not translate to the success of the ad campaign.
The real problem is not even the probability of conversion – it’s in the fact that a significant amount of traffic data presented by online advertising companies are generated with bots and pixel stuffing.
A study done by comScore that looked at ad campaigns in 2012 and 2013 came to the conclusion that 54% of the ads in those campaigns were never shown to a human visitor, and yet they were all no doubt counted as “impressions” in someone’s ad budget.
There are traffic brokers who buy specific amounts of traffic generated by bot farms and then sell that traffic to advertisers and publishers.
SOLUTION
To tackle this issue, Blockchain startups such as BitClave proposes a solution launching the “Bitclave Active Search Ecosystem” (BASE) – a decentralized ecosystem directly connecting consumers and businesses.
BASE uses a search engine method to connect users directly with what they are searching for – enabling them to create distinct profiles, identifying their line of content interest and searching for specific messages.
A decentralized system means control over data and control means irrelevant ads are removed. This does not directly solve the problem of bots and pixel stuffing for fake traffic but the presence of a more efficient method for audience insight means middlemen, online advertising agencies will face stiff competition and face the risk of insolvency if they do not justify the money paid to them for ads by businesses. A see no evil, hear no evil situation.
CONCLUSION
The future is now and decentralization is going to disrupt and overhaul the online advertising industry. BitClave makes it possible for the first time to optimize the seller-consumer value chain. In the BitClave Active Search Ecosystem (BASE), market economics drive incentives for data sharing that properly balances the tradeoff between market efficiency and personal privacy. Data still has immense value, but consumers and businesses have the power of choosing whether or not to share it. By eliminating forced data sharing and wasted revenue from today’s large advertising network solutions, everyone wins. BitClave’s open BASE ecosystem ensures innovation will continue in the advertising market as technology continues to evolve.
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