How Blockchain Is Changing a Digital Advertising Landscape
If we look at Google Trends, we’ll see precisely how blockchain as a search term has evolved in 5 years since 2013 and reached the peak of user interest in 2017.
In the past 12 months blockchain hogged the headlines of all major media, both top-tier and social, and became one of the most discussed topics at nearly every single industry event and tradeshow. While blockchain is mostly associated with FinTech and crypto space, its adoption goes far beyond these industries and can potentially affect and change every market by eliminating 3rd parties and pricing “dumps and pumps”, eradicating fraud, and adding more transparency to transactions while keeping them anonymous.
The blockchain business is only slightly more than 5 years old. It kicked off in 2012 with a few deals and small investments. According to Statista, in 2017, the global blockchain technology market was predicted to reach $339.5 million in size and is forecast to grow to $2.3 billion by 2021.
Without delving much into detail, it’s worth mentioning the two fundamental principles of the blockchain technology:
In blockchain, these records are stored in separate blocks that are connected as a chain, each having its unique key. After proof of authenticity, it becomes impossible to delete or modify a block, as the system will just never accept any alteration within the block. That being said, any blockchain record is approved by all network participants and once the information has been recorded, it can’t be undone. Because blockchain is able to capture transactions or database entries in their original state, it allows for preserving the authenticity of data for future observers such as platform users, clients, auditors, regulators, and other stakeholders.
While FinTech seems to have bitten the largest piece of the blockchain pie so far, other industries catch up quickly. Marketing and advertising, in particular, are no exception.
Blockchain enables decentralized validation of bots to protect ad dollars from flowing straight into the hackers’ hands. Modern ad bots are very sophisticated and are very difficult to detect. Bots are often deployed in bulk (a few thousand at a time), and they’re designed to mimic user behavior and ensure impressions, clicks, and interactions look reliable and can easily obfuscate advertisers.
Blockchain enables advertisers to identify and incentivize advertising and technology experts with tokens for detection of ad bots and helping stop fraud. In exchange for their support, experts earn tokens and can trade them on a crypto exchange or spend on advertising products and services within a marketplace (check out Knowledge.io, a blockchain-supported platform for advertisers and marketers).
Before the blockchain technology caught on, innovation in AdTech “centered mostly around automation of the buying process via programmatic and real-time bidding technologies”, as was once pointed by Marcia Hales, co-founder of Knowledge.io. The blockchain is a real disruptor of Big Data analytics as it makes it next to impossible for publishers to manipulate data sets and spend reports they provide to advertisers on a regular basis.
A happy marriage between Big Data and blockchain will ensure the better identification of ad consumption patterns among users and will help advertisers avoid risky transactions and better tailor their adverts to the actual user needs, demographics, and behavior-specific scenarios.
Furthermore, Big Data analytics makes it possible to identify patterns in consumer spending and identify risky transactions a lot quicker than they can be done currently. This helps reduce the cost of real-time transactions.
According to Yuriy Roshchenko, CTO and Head of Delivery at a software development outsourcing consultancy 8allocate, “We see more and more data analytics and blockchain development requests coming our way from AdTech and media companies.
