How Blockchain Aims to Change the Marketing Industry

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of profiles. And built models to exploit that and target their inner demons.”
(Christopher Wylie — source)

Igniting the Cambridge Analytica Scandal — Exposing Facebook’s Role in Influencing Voters
In 2013, Christopher Wylie, aimed for a Ph.D. in predicting fashion trends at the University of the Arts London. With a background in micro-targeting from his Bachelor specializing in technology, media, and IP law, the Canadian micro-data specialist, began working as a contractor at SCL Elections, later renamed as Cambridge Analytica. Three years later he was the one that provided the cache files that exposed and ignited the entire Facebook scandal, having rippling effects onto how users saw social media and data safety.

“The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.” (source — The Guardian, 17 March 2018)

One year later, waiting for the social network to make amends and work on user privacy, the public is still looking to seeing any major change happen. Meanwhile, Facebook wants to consolidate its own entity with Instagram and WhatsApp, ensuring corporate stability, but motivating that it will help with streamlining the privacy modifications they are expected to do. This adds even more fuel to lack of confidence from the public, and to movements like #BreakUpBigTech. This is what The Guardian had to say earlier this year:

“That ‘Break Up Big Tech’ would be a 2020 campaign slogan was unimaginable just two years ago. […] And yet, here we are. The Cambridge Analytica revelations may not have changed Facebook, but they did change us. Our eyes are now open. The question is what we will do. “— (source)

The aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica prompted the need to search for solutions that offer a more secure and transparent data management used in any marketing or campaign. People began looking into the use of blockchain technology. Being a decentralized data ledger that removes any intermediary, allowing for direct transactions between two or more parties involved in a commercial connection, blockchain proves to be a technology that can change the entire marketing industry. Below we discuss three examples.