According to the statistical company Statista, the advertising business volume this year will reach $563 billion.
In addition to the standard (in print, television, etc.), advertising has long been leaked into the digital space, and giants as Google and Facebook are going along in the head of this victorious advertising march.
Undoubtedly, their contribution to the advertising business is colossal, but on the other hand, they dictate the rules, acting as intermediaries between entrepreneurs and their potential customers. Business owners track coverage statistics and continue to allocate significant amounts from their budgets to promote network posts.
Moreover, the intermediary’s presence in any of the processes can always call into question the transparency between all parties.
Nowadays, it’s impossible to stop advertising your business, but a blockchain solution can be implemented in its configuration.
The technology opens up new opportunities for the advertising industry, combining in a single decentralized network the advertisers, publishers and potential customers. The blockchain will relieve everyone of mediation and will allow building a more transparent relationship between business and end users.
Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird? It’s a Plane? It’s Blockchain!
First of all, the blockchain is an ideal solution for advertisers in terms of micro-payments. But for marketers, this technology will significantly improve the quality of analysis of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
The blockchain is a kind of controlling tool, confirming that a certain budget was spent on the promised number of views.
Do you know why it is so important? Because this fact is indeed an important catalyst for the implementation of distributed registry technology in the publisher-advertiser relationship, as there are often disputes between these parties regarding the ad impressions number and this is the biggest problem in the digital advertising industry!
For your understanding, I’ll give an example: the marketing platform assures that there were 20,000 views during the campaign, the publisher claims to be 25,000, and the advertiser insists on a 15,000 indicator.
Thus, it is necessary to initiate inspections that can be delayed for many days, or even months. As a result, the advertiser feels cheated, trust in marketing platforms is rolling down, and publishers earn their cons in karma.
Now imagine that a marketing campaign takes place on the blockchain and all information and its details, including the contract, is entered into the decentralized registry, where it is kept unchanged.
Since all parties (platform, publisher, and advertiser) have access to this information and can observe all the processes occurring (the number of views, interactions, responses), there will be no disputes at the campaign end.
There is another way to establish a transparent relationship between the advertising business characters — smart contracts. For example, a smart contract is executed until an advertisement is displayed as many times as the advertiser has paid for how many views.
Decentralized Blow to the Target Audience
It is also necessary to mention the most common problem encountered by advertisers, which I propose to consider the U.S. manufacturer of men’s accessories as an example.
Target: 10,000 impressions for men aged between 18 and 35 living in the USA. The company sought the help of a marketing platform that promised well-tuned targeting and the specified TA maximum coverage.
So, 10,000 views have been achieved, but the ads were unsuccessful, a customer was dissatisfied, and comments in the advertising post are full of the same type of “Cool”, sent out by bots.
According to data from various analytical companies, bots captured from 50% to 70% of all advertising traffic. Such disappointing figures may change for the better, rather, to disappear only through the introduction of honest and transparent decentralized systems which are able to track all traffic and guarantee the accuracy of the location of users who have viewed the advertising publication, due to the passage of verification.
Based on the target audience, the decentralized platform is able to provide advertisers with direct access to the necessary media resources for buying advertising directly from media owners.
This platform type involves the specific plug-in installation on the advertisers’ site, through which they will access reports, media metrics and analytics of their advertising campaigns in real time.
To motivate users to take polls and actively participate in advertising campaigns, it is necessary to introduce an awards system in the form of the platform’s token. Tokens are rewarded sites for the visitors’ attention to their content and users for viewing online advertising.
Additionally, implementing a blockchain platform option is possible, where the fact that the company is not a fraudster is confirmed by community members by universal voting. If a marketing agency representative decides to use the customer confidence and renders his services of poor quality, he will be excluded from the “white” companies list, having lost his reputation forever.
Thus, the possibility of creating an honest business, depending on the image of its representatives, is open.
Conclusion
The technological era of blockchain is upon us; for example, IBM is already investing multimillion-dollar amounts in this area of development.
And what about Zuckerberg? Don’t think that I forgot about him.
The fact is that Facebook acquired blockchain-startup Chainspace and it inspired me to write this article. As stated in the official Chainspace documents, the project is creating a decentralized smart contracts system for making payments and other operations in the blockchain. I doubt that this purchase will bypass the online advertising system of the largest social network.
The decentralized advertising sphere is like a new milestone on the way to provide better services and rapprochement between companies and their consumers.
Vladimir Malakchi. CMO of 482.solutions
