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You can summarize one of the themes of our ongoing series on potential blockchain attacks in the company using one word: Trust.
Blockchain is not suitable everywhere, and even in areas where it has an obvious appeal, it is not likely to be an immediate success. But as we wrote in a recent post on how to develop emerging technology, "blockchain could provide value in any scenario where trust is a problem, in any transactional relationship or business process that involves data or other resources."
[ Can you explain blockchain to non-techies? Read our related story, How to explain blockchain in plain English. ]
As stated by Gordon Haff, the technology evangelist, Red Hat, from the Connected Things event at the MIT Enterprise Forum, trust was a key topic during the blockchain discussion. Haff noted that Andrew Stahl, SVP's business innovation for SAP, considers "… trust, in cases where an entity does not already have trust or direct control of all participants in the network, as a key to thinking about where the blockchain could be more useful. "
Digital advertising fraud will cost advertisers $ 19 billion in 2018, according to Juniper Research.
So try this for a trust problem: digital advertising fraud will cost advertisers $ 19 billion in 2018, according to Juniper Research. This is 9% of total digital advertising spending. If you're an advertiser, it's like supposing that almost a card in ten that you spend disappears in digital ether with a zero ROI. Juniper Research predicts that advertising fraud will reach $ 44 billion in 2020.
Bad actors and botnets have a price
Digital advertising, which Juniper calls "advertising on online and mobile devices", has become a huge business and a huge target for bad actors who use botnets and other tactics to steal large volumes of legitimate advertising spend through clicks and impressions fraudulent.
Just recently, the Justice Department has annulled the indictment of 13 defendants accusing eight men of alleged multi-million dollar digital advertising fraud. As reported by BuzzFeedNews, the accusation was followed by a coordinated effort by the FBI and a group of technology, advertising and cybersecurity companies.
So, yes, there's a bit of trust issues in digital ad space. In fact, according to industry experts, there is a wider issue of transparency, or lack of it, particularly when money moves between the major stakeholders – another sign that the blockchain could be a good one measure.
"In digital advertising, current systems are opaque with little or no ability to actually demonstrate how money has shifted between advertiser and publisher," says Adbank CEO Jon Gillham. "In addition to expensive and unreliable brokers, the current system is easily exploited by criminals who use robots to produce counterfeit clicks and displays of ads, resulting in billions of dollars in advertisers' budgets being stolen. inherent in the blockchain technology, these problems with the current advertising system can be addressed. "
Lessons for your sector
The problem of advertising fraud can be a particularly dramatic example, but it offers a model for IT leaders in other areas on how to think about where the blockchain might be appropriate in their activities. What problems exist in your processes or transaction flows – internally, between partners, with customers or in your broader sector – that traditional databases or technologies are not doing a good job of resolution? Blockchain could be at least part of the answer if trust, transparency or lack of interoperability and standards – or all of the above – is a problem.
[ Where is blockchain making tangible progress? See our related story: Blockchain in action: 5 interesting examples. ]
Ed Featherston, a distinguished technologist at Cloud Technology Partners, notes that blockchain could help "by providing a reliable ledger of impressions on which all parties agree, and the blockchain would provide an immutable record of access / actual impression of the ads that it is transparent and visible to all parts. "
The advertising industry can quantify its trust problem with a (big) dollar figure, but keep in mind that sometimes trust and transparency issues are not immediately financial, but in other forms of data. This is a key reason why the health industry is experimenting with blockchain, for example.
This is also true in the world of digital advertising. Even if it eventually translates into dollars, it all starts with data: impressions, clicks and so on. And today there are too often discrepancies in advertising data, says Nikao Yang, COO of Lucidity.
Yang sees several key applications for blockchain in the advertising industry. Here is an interesting exercise for IT managers: replace some of the most important resources and vocabulary in your industry for the terminology of the announcement below. In fact, it is not even necessary to do this in some cases, as in the first point:
- "Provide a unified data set for billing between multiple parties – agreed and available transparently for all participants."
- "Identify any inconsistencies in data in the supply chain that generate invalid impressions and waste of expense."
- "Capture and eliminate domain spoofing, a practice in which a fraudulent website masquerades as a legitimate publisher and steals the advertising brand."
- "Optimize campaigns from sites with click data or discrepant impressions for better performance, such as blockchain can help identify and move shopping away from bot traffic sites."
- "Apply agreed advertising standards, such as what makes an ad viewable, what defines a billable impression or what constitutes a conversion event, the technological application of standards and the validation of compliance with these standards in a transparent way they are essential to clean up the ecosystem. "
