When you hear of blockchain, do you automatically think of Bitcoin? For a long time, when people thought of the internet, they mostly associated it with email. The internet supplied the tech to deliver email apps. In the same way, blockchain provides a distributed tech to store and process data. Modern marketing relies on data. It's only natural that progressive marketers have started figuring out the benefits of blockchain for marketing and ways in which they can mitigate ad fraud.
Three Benefits of Marketing With Blockchain Tech
Explore a few of the benefits that blockchain tech can offer marketing.
1. Data Transparency With Data-Driven Ads
Harvard Business Review pointed out that the biggest issues companies have with data-driven ad providers include fraud and a lack of transparency. The lack of transparency and accountability makes it difficult to ascertain how ad dollars are spent. The cost of ad fraud globally is expected to increase to $50 billion over the next decade.
A recent study into the state of programmatic advertising revealed that 79% of advertisers surveyed expressed worries about transparency, with over a third regarding the lack of visibility on third parties as one of their key concerns.
Advertising companies can use blockchain tech to address these concerns. With blockchain, updates get added to old records, but nothing is deleted or lost. Blockchain advertising companies let their customers know exactly where their ads are served and who responded. This allows companies like Adbank to authenticate traffic and subvert ad fraud.
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 placed, alleviating ad fraud from automated bots.
"[Blockchain] allows multiple parties to access information. And that information is in a secured, immutable and decentrally owned data store,” says Ken Brook, founder and CEO at MetaX. “No one controls the database. Individual parties don't have the ability to doctor the data. This allows multiple parties to coordinate on a digital marketing campaign and be able to reconcile the first-party data that they're tracking with third-party data that's sourced from the blockchain.”
Verifying that real followers and consumers engage with their ads and ensuring proper ad engagement tracking will lead to more precise digital attribution.
2. Direct Marketing
Musicians, authors and other content producers may rely on Soundcloud, Amazon or YouTube to distribute content. In return, they usually get paid a few pennies for each view of their content. In some cases, they aren't paid for their content but for the ads that run alongside it.
The Steem blockchain has tried to change this model by allowing content creators to directly market their work to their audience. Steem is digital currency like Bitcoin, but it provides various platforms with a currency to pay or get paid for digital content.
For instance, writers, artists and video producers can get paid in Steem, which they can later exchange for other digital or national currencies. Steem aims to be the digital content reward payment system. It's used on other platforms like Dtube, a content-rewarding site similar to YouTube that strays away from ad-based payments. It provides viewers with more content and no ads.
3. Privacy Protection
Internet users have grown increasingly unhappy about the way that companies track their histories, violate their privacy, and sell their data.
Brave is an open-source, blockchain-powered browser that blocks ads and website trackers. It's designed to improve online privacy by sharing less personal data with advertisers, yet targeting web ads to visitors by analyzing anonymized user browsing behavior.
The browser aims to offer a secure, anonymous gateway to the internet without unintentional ad downloads. Similar to Steem, Brave offers BAT tokens that Brave users can use to reward contributors or to buy things. Brave said that its browser runs up to eight times faster than typical browsers on mobile and twice as fast on a desktop.
Brave, developed by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich, has filed privacy complaints in Ireland and Britain against Google. The complaint reportedly states that Google and the advertising technology (Adtech) industry practice “wide-scale and systematic breaches of the data protection regime” in the way they publish personalized online ads.
Eich said that Brave seeks to eliminate the middleman in the ad industry, “trying to reconnect the funding that comes in gross payments after the fact from advertisers and gets chopped down by a bunch of middle players, notably Google, and the remnants are given to publishers.”
The complaint further explains that while a user is visiting a website, “tens or hundreds” of companies receive their personal data to place ads and users are not aware that their data is shared.
How Can Blockchain Benefit Your Marketing?
It doesn't matter whether you are a fan of cryptocurrencies - They're just one application of blockchain.
In the future, blockchain might fuel solutions for marketing problems for both small and large companies. Among these include allowing marketers to know who is viewing their ads and how their money is spent.
Blockchain marketing can also grow users' trust by preventing intrusive and annoying ads that drain your device’s battery and waste bandwidth. With blockchain marketing, you can improve users' experience by protecting their privacy and increasing transparency.
See what we at HexaGroup are doing to advance this.
