Smart Contracts and their role in digital marketing

Our recent articles have covered NFTs and their creative uses. This week, I want to speculate on other ways to leverage the blockchain for marketing without covering NFTs. As helpful as they are, it feels like they take too much of the air in the room right now. Let’s expand our horizons for a bit.

I won’t get in-depth into smart contracts, nor do we need to be experts for this discussion. Several resources will do a better job than I could, for example, this, that, and the other. But just in case, here’s my attempt at explaining them in tweet length:

Smart contracts are self-executing…well, contracts. The terms of the agreement are written as lines of code, stored, and replicated on the blockchain. They automatically enforce and verify the terms, facilitating, verifying, and executing transactions seamlessly and trustlessly.

The self-executing nature means smart contracts can automate transactions based on predefined criteria. This could mean payment for advertising or affiliate marketing that can be released automatically when a designated number of clicks or conversions are reached. It enables more trust between advertisers, publishers, and users: everyone can verify the terms of the advertising campaign and how the funds from these are distributed.

An application for smart contracts in digital marketing is to facilitate more personalized marketing by securely handling user data. Users can control their data and grant access through smart contracts, enabling marketers to tailor campaigns more effectively and creatively while respecting privacy. And for the lawyers in the room: smart contracts can be programmed to comply with various advertising standards and regulations, ensuring campaigns are automatically compliant.

These agreements can drive a sea change in the advertising world: decentralized ad platforms. Smart contracts can enable the creation of decentralized advertising platforms where advertisers and content creators directly interact without intermediaries, leading to reduced costs and increased efficiency. For influencers and creators, this means transparent and fair compensation based on agreed-upon metrics like engagement rates or sales generated.

Over the last decade, crowdsourced products have become an established model. I may have spent too much money on Kickstarter. I want to see a decentralized crowdsourcing platform that can automatically enforce the funding of a project. To explore the idea further, the platform could require that the project contracts be tied automatically to sourcing and manufacturing contracts that execute upon the project reaching its funding goal, reducing the cost and work to fulfill a project and minimizing duds.

As we look towards the future, the possibilities for smart contracts in digital marketing seem boundless. One prospect is the potential integration of smart contracts with other emerging technologies like AI and IoT. Leveraging these technologies could lead to even more sophisticated and automated marketing strategies, where smart contracts manage transactions and adapt marketing efforts in real-time based on data-driven insights.

In conclusion, smart contracts are not just a technological novelty but are poised to revolutionize digital marketing. From automated compliance to personalized marketing campaigns, from decentralized platforms to integrated project funding and execution, the potential is immense. Dappfuse can harness this potential by plugging your existing stack into the blockchain so your brand can execute these ideas faster and with better telemetry.

Let’s keep our eyes on the horizon — the future of digital marketing with smart contracts is not just promising; it’s already unfolding. Reach out to Dappfuse to start a conversation on how to shape it.