How Blockchain Is Transforming Digital Marketing
This article is written by our community member Reese Jones. She spotted important problems and trends in the advertisement market which can be solved with the help of blockchain technology.
With rising budgets for ads and the ever-growing complexity of the advertising landscape, digital marketing has evolved in leaps and bounds. This is all thanks to the technological innovations that have shaped consumer demand, merchant business models, and advertising channels in the past decade.
But experts note that digital marketing may yet again go through another transformation brought about by a ground-breaking technology: blockchain. While most associate distributed ledger technologies with cryptocurrencies and financing instruments, the underlying technology has the potential to transform digital marketing. Here’s how:
Promotes trust and transparency
Trust and transparency are the most valuable currencies in digital marketing. Advertising experts at The Drum highlight how these two issues continue to dominate ad-tech initiatives — giving rise to a host of solutions to improve consumers’ trust and supply chain visibility. As public blockchains are essentially databases that are immutable and available to any party to verify, they can be used to improve transparency in digital marketing. It is indeed the technology for the Future of Collaboration.
With ad fraud costing companies billions of pounds, blockchain will be able to expose and block hidden fees.
This can combat ad fraud — a scheme that uses bots and algorithms to inflate ad costs. With the use of blockchain, marketers can now verify that the real targeted audience watched the advertisement within the prescribed time. With ad fraud costing companies billions of pounds, blockchain will be able to expose and block hidden fees.
Cuts through the noise
Today, digital marketing is a data-driven industry. Case in point, digital marketing companies emphasize the importance of using accurate data to appeal to consumer needs. Yet, fake news, click farms, and fraudulent practices obscure consumer data being collected from target audiences — making it harder to deliver valuable and personalized content. Through blockchain technologies, you can more precisely measure and demonstrate the impact of various marketing campaigns, resulting in clearly targeted ads and therefore delivering better value to consumers.
As the information derived from metrics and data are stored in decentralized ledgers, you can continuously improve marketing campaigns without worrying about spending on simulated engagement. In fact, the Financial Times reports that fake clicks alone cost companies at least £4.8 billion in ad spend a year.
Improves data privacy
One of the key criticisms that the industry has been facing is data privacy. The past two years saw a rise in stringent data privacy laws including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act in the US, the Data Privacy Act in the UK, and Brazil’s General Data Protection Law. That is on top of the increasing number of data breaches parading in the headlines, and digital marketing is receiving most of the flak.
Blockchain applications have the potential to not only help companies comply with these laws but ultimately safeguard consumer data in an unprecedented way. It can show end-users that only agency employees have access to specific customer data and have proper protocols in place — without compromising data or adding unnecessary complexity.
Cuts the middleman
Advertisers don’t directly collect and track data from consumers. In fact, most marketers buy data or advanced insight from their customer data from ad networks. With blockchain technologies, advertisers can create their own networks and keep their customer data. After some time, this can eventually lead to advertisers directly accessing their customer’s data and tracking metrics from their audiences. This can improve personalization and build unique loyalty reward systems for their customers.
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Conclusion
As the use cases of blockchain in digital marketing continue to grow, so will the investments in the ad-tech space. Venture Beat reports that the blockchain industry has grown 13 times in a span of 18 months. To date, there are now 290 blockchain projects and companies that are developing use cases in various areas of digital marketing including content and social marketing, eCommerce, and decentralized advertising.
Written by Reese Jones for evenfound.org
