Insights and guides about blockchain-based advertising
How blockchain can enable the transparency and traceability of digital media exchange in online advertising.
Blockchain removes unnecessary intermediaries and arbitrage in the media buying supply chain, ensuring complete visibility into how advertisements are delivered from publisher to advertiser.
Improved credibility and trust of ads traded
Reduced potential risk of supply chain malpractice
Higher engagement, more happy customers
Strengthened reputation of publishers
Blockchain can allow for improved transparency and traceability of media exchange throughout the digital advertising supply chain. Unlike traditional advertising where digital media is exchanged between centralized ad servers, a blockchain-based supply chain is distributed and decentralized, without a central point of trust, so each party is able to directly track and exchange ad inventory.
Enabling blockchain can help supply partners (publishers – websites, mobile apps) to track bids, transactions, ad placements, quality, and other relevant information to effectively manage media inventory supply. This information within blockchain can significantly lower losses from ad fraud and malvertising and potentially enhance a publisher’s position as a trusted provider of high quality traffic.
As demand partners (advertisers, agencies, networks) seek more transparency and the complexity of ad supply chains increases, it is important to find a cost-effective and effortless way to trace each impression served for an advertisement to build confidence that there is no friction or lost revenues in online media buying otherwise.
Publishers and advertisers can improve their ad exchange through more transparent and accurate end-to-end ad tracking. As per IAB’s survey conducted in 2019, over 85% of advertisers consider media buying transparency as a critical factor impacting their budget decisions and expect publishers to provide the necessary information about traffic in full, on demand. An estimated 67% of advertisers are ready to pay premium CPM rates for traffic from publishers who promote transparent ad selling.
With blockchain, it is possible to create a decentralized, immutable record of impressions, clicks and other ad performance measures, making it possible to track advertisements from advertiser to publisher down to end-user (consumer) and provide greater value to all the parties, comparing to traditional digital advertising. So blockchain provides businesses with more visibility into the ads they buy and sell.
According to eMarketer, digital ad fraud hits over $6.5 billion in programmatic media buys annually in 2019. Furthermore, an estimated 30-40 percent of traffic sold via non-RTB, performance-based advertising (including affiliate CPA and CPI) are fraudulent, leading to billions of dollars in advertiser revenue losses globally. Fraud prevention systems such as Forensiq, FraudScore, Evertrack, 24metrics, etc. help fight fraudulent ads to some extent but they deal with consequences, not causes.
Blockchain’s transparency may help reduce fraudulent traffic for programmatic RTB and CPA advertising marketplaces. Publishers, solution providers and advertisers are enabled to see how advertisements are served through every tracking system in the supply chain and reduce profit losses from online fraud and black-hat media buys. Furthermore, less time can be spent validating traffic data and more can be invested in improving ad delivery – either improving quality, reducing cost, or both.
In traditional centralized advertising, ad operations or “ad ops” can take hours, days or sometimes weeks involving the sale, serving, targeting, reporting, and performance optimization. This happens due to manual checks for compliance or credit purposes that potentially restrain communication and increase traffic losses.
Blockchain provides all parties involved in the same ad ops process in a company or within a respective supply chain with access to a single pool of data, allowing for automated traffic quality checks and ad verification between the parties. It streamlines administrative processes and reduces traffic losses by enabling an effective audit of advertising supply chain data.