How Blockchain could change online advertising forever

The online advertising industry is not just booming. Perhaps it has never been more powerful – or important – than it is now, according to a recent Forrester study.

In fact, by 2021, marketing budgets for advertisers in the United States will increase to $ 120 billion a year which shows no signs of slowing down at any time.

With advertising networks like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, online advertising is nothing if not malleable. But this malleability is at the same time its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

On the one hand, online advertisers can rely on huge volumes of data to make smarter, more informed decisions about what is or does not work for them [19659002] This offers advertisers the ability to reach and build real and organic with their audience in more rapid and efficient ways than printing alone can ever offer.

On the other hand, even the world of online advertising is constantly evolving: the industry that exists today has little resemblance to what we already knew five years ago.

Right now, the industry is at the height of another huge transformation that is ready to change all over again.

If you thought blockchain technology was something that only crypto-miners and bitcoin enthusiasts had to worry about, you might want to think again.

It has a number of fascinating implications for online advertisers worth exploring.

What is Blockchain? Breaking Things Down

Although blockchain as a term seems complicated, the concept at the center of the blockchain is actually quite simple.

Blockchain refers to a particular type of digital ledger where transactions (usually done in bitcoin or some other type of cryptocurrency) are recorded in a way that is:

As a result, a standard blockchain transaction can be divided into the following steps:

• Someone requests a transaction, which is then transmitted to a P2P network made up of computers (also called nodes).
• That computer network then validates the transaction, along with the status of the requesting user, through a series of sophisticated algorithms.
• Once the transaction has completed the verification, it is then combined with other recent transactions to create a new block of data.
• This new block is then added to the ledger, thus literally becoming "another block in the chain". This passage is fundamental, since the block then exists forever. It is not only permanent and publicly available, but it is also totally unalterable.
• At this point, the original transaction is now complete.

In fact, it is this verification process – together with the permanence of the record – that leads to

Visibility.

When the blockchain was originally developed, it was designed to solve something of a double-expense problem that bitcoins had encountered.

If left unchecked, the same digital "token" can be spent more than once, creating a situation where it is easier to forge cryptocurrency and artificially inflate the market accordingly.

Blockchain has become the best way to solve this problem, all without having to turn to a certain type of central server or other trusted authority – an element that the cryptocurrency was partly designed to eliminate in the first place.

Again, blockchain is safe from desi gn. This makes the world of digital money particularly valuable.

But if I had to make a list of other sectors that could benefit from this new level of visibility, security and accountability, online advertising would undoubtedly be right at the top.

The state of online advertising today

To say that online advertising has a problem of fraud is a euphemism.

According to a recent study, up to 7.6% of all display ad impressions in 2017 were fraudulent.

In recent years, the amount of money that online marketing professionals have lost through advertising fraud has jumped to $ 6.5 billion in the last year according to the National Advertisers Association and the # 39. White Ops fraud detection organization – a number that stops at around $ 1 on every $ 3 spent on digital marketing efforts.

In today's digital world, online advertising is the best way for brands of all shapes and sizes to connect with the public they serve and.

But online advertising comes with a rather large "catch": it becomes less and less secure (and "authentic") from day to day.

Advertising fraud does more than cost money to marketers. It erodes the delicate sense of trust between a brand and its consumers, thus damaging its longevity and potential reach along the way.

Of course, something needs to be done about this problem sooner rather than later.

There are a number of good reasons why blockchain could very well be that "something" that we were all looking for.

The implications of Blockchain Moving Forward

1. Advertisers can connect directly to consumers

Probably the most immediate impact blockchain will have on digital display advertising, something that makes up a significant part of all online marketing activities.

While the system is working now, both the advertiser and

The inventories of digital display ads are controlled almost entirely by just two companies: Facebook and Google.

With blockchain, however, it is easy to imagine a situation in which these intermediaries are not only less powerful – they could become totally irrelevant to the exchange.

You already see this to some extent with examples like BAT (Basic Attention Token) that allow advertisers to pay people based on the "mental effort" required

BAT and similar disintermediation technologies do not just eliminate the the need for advertisers to go through companies like Google or Facebook, but also to connect them to their potential customers more directly.

But the biggest implication of this is this: instead of company A paying Google to publish ads for people based on "fingerprints", that same company could simply pay consumers

In other words, if Blockchain allowed advertisers to connect directly to these consumers, the media buying process, as we know at present, will cease to exist.

Beyond this advantage, the ledger at the center of the blockchain could also offer advertisers critical visibility (that is, an advertiser could actually confirm that someone saw an ad before the exchange of currency).

Indeed, many experts already agree that at least blockchain will mean more direct business between advertisers, publishers and their users. It's easy to see that this is good news for almost everyone, even Google or Facebook – both make up the bulk of the revenue from advertising.

2. Less intrusive and more effective advertising

Along the same lines, blockchain also has the potential to solve another major problem of digital advertising: the ads themselves.

Not only are display ads intrusive for many, but for mobile users, in particular, they also consume the battery of a device and waste an incredible amount of bandwidth.

With blockchain and solutions like the aforementioned BAT technology, however, there is a real potential to change the way people interact with these ads.

The BAT-based Brave browser, in particular, allows users to essentially "opt for" the display of ads based on the type of content they want to see.

Not only does it provide users with information to advertisers in a way that still maintains anonymity of the user, but also users get less ads of higher quality that are more specific than what they are really interested in.

So the ads themselves become less intrusive, and less effective and more effective because they are more relevant, thus eliminating bandwidth and mobile battery discharges, which are enormous benefits for device manufacturers such as Apple and Amazon.

3. Transparency

Similar to its application in the world of cryptocurrency, the most important implicit blockchain leads to the world of online advertising is transparency.

All the major networks in this space – Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple – have made a huge amount of money in a field that until now has remained as obscure as humanly possible.

But thanks to the superior visibility and tamper-proof nature of the blockchain ledger system, all this stands for

Blockchain generally enhances search engine markers precisely because it is able to verify that each user is authentic 100%, which translates into website owners paid only for actual clicks on their site.

Advertising will also become more efficient because blockchain will allow advertisers to create customer profiles directly from information that customers are willing to share, improving targeting and relevance, and ultimately conversing ons and revenues.

For example, in a blockchain-based model, when an ad is advertised for a particular product as a consumer, you do not even have to worry if you're about to fall into someone's trap from the middle of the world.

You can immediately see what product it is and where it comes from. If you want to buy it, you know if you are buying it directly from Amazon or from the Amazon market.

You have the full story of the product behind an ad at your disposal as a public issue, putting an incredible amount of power in the hands of users all over the world – right where it always belonged.

In the end

While it is tempting to think that ad giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have the biggest loss when it comes to blockchain, such conclusions can be premature.

Indeed, it is important to recognize that much of this is still a hypothetical scenario. Yes, the blockchain exists and yes, people are already using it effectively in online advertising space.

But the big four still have nothing to fear (or celebrate, if that's why) yet.

Beyond this, it might be prudent to point out that Google has already announced that it is building its blockchain for cloud and transactional services and that the company and other giants like him could use it as a catalyst to rethink the current advertising model, especially because blockchain offers so much potential for brands to use advertising to build deeper relationships with consumers.

However, unlike the big four, advertisers and end-users have everything to gain from the disruption of the old paradigm.

The fact remains that technology is evolving at an incredibly fast pace. Even these potential blockchain applications in terms of online advertising would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Yet here we are.

So, while we are still at the dawn of a revolution in digital advertising, the future blockchain is pointing towards one in which we would all like to live.

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