MEDIA Protocol, Marketing And Blockchain — Part 1

4 min readMay 18, 2018

The team here at MEDIA Protocol are deeply committed to creating a more direct, transparent and secure ecosystem for content creators, publishers, and consumers through the revolutionary application of blockchain technology. We’re here to connect the worlds of marketing and technology for everyone’s benefit.

We’ve got love for both worlds, but from our own experience we know that they can sometimes feel, literally, worlds apart. So we’re committed, not just to connecting them, but to creating a common understanding between them.

This series of articles aims to explain the relationship between marketing and blockchain to help everyone — the marketeers, the technologists, and the content consumers — understand the principles behind this game-changing technology.

We want to help educate by demystifying the potential applications of blockchain technology. The Media Protocol team feel it’s vital to highlight and clarify the potential of blockchain in the marketing world; how it provides transparency, efficiency, reliability and accuracy.

Strap in, and welcome to the MEDIA Protocol Blockchain Marketing Programme.

Part 1 — The Potential Impact Of Blockchain On Marketing: Volume

Of all the assets available to marketing teams, analytics are often the most crucial. To have meaningful analytics and quantify performance businesses need to be able to analyse data — something that is being generated at an unprecedented rate.

Forget mega-, giga- and terabytes. By 2020 it is estimated that there will be a collective 44 zettabytes of data to handle. When a zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes, it gives some idea of the scale and abundance of information out there.

The Age Of Big Data

Big Data is the term used to encapsulate the sheer scale of data we currently generate, both structured and unstructured. From the amount alone, conventional methods of parsing and analysing data will often fall short, unable to perform the numerous and complex processes required to analyse, interpret and generate meaningful patterns and results.

The Four Vs

When discussing Big Data there are four key concepts to consider, affectionately referred to as The Four Vs. In this series we’ll be expanding on each of these key characteristics of Big Data separately, but let’s introduce them up front for now:

Volume
Velocity
Variety
Veracity

Volume is the first and perhaps most obvious attribute. As mentioned above, there’s a phenomenal amount of data out there already, with more being added every day. Estimates suggest as much as 2.5 quintillion bytes per day.

The increasing reliance on cloud storage has more companies moving to a model where they can embrace Big Data and the valuable information it contains for their business. Having more raw data available to analyse allows for better, more informed decision-making.

But this brings its own set of challenges.

Big Data And Blockchain

Some of the more obvious benefits of blockchain for Big Data, such as the security and traceability of the distributed ledger, will be covered in future articles. However, when it comes to volume, the biggest asset of blockchain is the networking of so many computers and their processing power. This unique aspect, fundamental to the execution of blockchain technology, allows data to be handled on a huge scale, similar to cloud storage, but without the vulnerabilities of a centralised server, to hacking for example.

What Does This Mean For Marketing?

The clearest application is in programmatic advertising. By having incredibly specific user information and behaviour data available to them, companies can reduce the risk of advertisements being closed or blocked, as they’ll be targeted to the right person at the right time.

That level of specificity, of truly personalised ad targeting, is only possible through Big Data processing.

The key to processing Big Data successfully and efficiently, is blockchain technology.

To find out the other benefits blockchain is bringing to marketing, specifically Big Data, check out the other posts in this series.

Read All Parts In Our Blockchain Marketing Programme:

Part 1 — The Potential Impact Of Blockchain On Marketing: Volume (This article above)
Part 2 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Velocity Coming Soon
Part 3 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Variety Coming Soon
Part 4 — The Potential Impact of Blockchain on Marketing: Veracity Coming Soon