What Blockchain Could Mean for Marketing

In recent years, a major pain point for brands and advertisers has been the lack of transparency and accountability in being able to ascertain how their ad dollars have been spent. Digital advertising is complex, because ensuring that the media that was purchased was actually delivered as it was intended, is non-trival today. Ad fraud is pervasive, and costs marketers and publishers significant amount of money. Blockchain can make data-driven marketing more transparent by validating and analyzing every consumer’s journey through verified ad delivery, confirming that a real person saw the ad as per the specifics of a media contract. Marketers will able to control how their assets are delivered by monitoring exactly where their ads are being placed, alleviating ad fraud from automated bots by ensuring that real followers and consumers are engaging with their ads, and ensuring proper ad engagement tracking that will lead to more precise digital attribution. Blockchain’s inherent ledger-based transparency can help companies build trust with consumers, giving rise to markets for consumer data that will not only give users a transparent look at how their data has been used by advertisers, but will also give them more control over how their data should be used.

Companies are collecting more data than ever before, and are making significant business decisions based on it. Of the 4 Vs of Big Data(Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity), we have now seen ample evidence of the impact and importance of the first three. A higher “Volume” of data has led to more efficient decision-making in numerous instances, such as in programmatic marketing and in banking. Research has shown how leveraging high “Velocity” data — such as data from mobile devices — has unearthed knowledge that has helped firms better understand their customers. The significant potential of high “Variety” data — data that is unstructured in the form of text, images, videos, and so on — to make better predictions has been documented in numerous academic studies. But what about issues related to the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of the data itself, which basically comprises the fourth V, “Veracity”? In the field of data-driven marketing, an answer to addressing this limitation lies in blockchain technology.

Here are five basic principles underlying the technology. Each party on a blockchain has access to the entire database and its complete history. No single party controls the data or the information. Every party can verify the records of its transaction partners directly, without an intermediary. Communication occurs directly between peers instead of through a central node. Each node stores and forwards information to all other nodes. Every transaction and its associated value are visible to anyone with access to the system. Each node, or user, on a blockchain has a unique 30-plus-character alphanumeric address that identifies it. Users can choose to remain anonymous or provide proof of their identity to others. Transactions occur between blockchain addresses. Once a transaction is entered in the database and the accounts are updated, the records cannot be altered, because they’re linked to every transaction record that came before them (hence the term “chain”). Various computational algorithms and approaches are deployed to ensure that the recording on the database is permanent, chronologically ordered, and available to all others on the network. The digital nature of the ledger means that blockchain transactions can be tied to computational logic and in essence programmed. So users can set up algorithms and rules that automatically trigger transactions between nodes.

In recent years, a major pain point for brands and advertisers has been the lack of transparency and accountability in being able to ascertain how their ad dollars have been spent.