Lucidity Launches Pilot Program with IAB to Test Blockchain’s Applicability for Advertising

We believe in the real-world applicability of blockchain. That’s why we’ve spent the last 10 months laser-focused on building product — iteration after iteration — endlessly testing our system to make it usable for the digital advertising industry.

Today, we are beyond excited to announce a major step forward in our goal to make blockchain applicable for digital advertising:

Lucidity is launching a pilot program with the IAB’s (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Tech Lab to officially test the applicability of blockchain for programmatic advertising.

The point of the pilot program, above all else, is to uncover learnings that will guide the development of best practices and standards for all future blockchain-based applications within digital advertising. These learnings will help contribute to an industry whitepaper to be released later this year.

We are joined by a number of select brands, agencies and partners who are committed to solving the transparency problem in digital advertising, including:

• AppNexus
• Audience Group
• CPXi Asia
• DEx.top
• Fearless Group
• GameStop
• Giant Spoon
• The Richards Group
• Sourcenext
• Viamedia
• Zig Marketing

Together with our partners, we acknowledge that a paradigm shift is happening within the advertising community. Brands are pulling massive ad budgets due to waste and fraud, and trust among supply chain partners is eroding. Decentralization — powered by blockchain — could pave the way forward.

“Finding practical, working solutions to deliver trust and transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem is necessary. Blockchain has the potential to play a key role,” said Viren Tellis, Senior Director, Marketplace Management, AppNexus. “With multiple applications to create value at both ends of the supply chain, we’re looking forward to reviewing the early results of the Lucidity pilot to see what blockchain has to offer AppNexus and its partners.”

“Programmatic ad buying has been in a race to the bottom in recent years, eroding client trust along the way,” said Marc Simons, co-founder, Giant Spoon. “We believe Lucidity’s blockchain technology will have real positive impact on addressing fraud, waste and transparency issues and we are excited to be a part of their pilot project.”

The pilot will be utilizing the Lucidity protocol to test blockchain’s capacity to validate advertising events and provide supply chain transparency across a variety of collaborators in the programmatic space. Problems with data discrepancies, lack of fee transparency, and ad fraud are the first of many we’re addressing.

The big question has long been if blockchain can scale to match the speed of an industry like programmatic advertising, where millions of transactions happen every second. We believe it can, and have developed a “Layer 2” sidechain infrastructure that exponentially increases the throughput of root blockchain technologies like Ethereum.

We are eager to share our Layer 2 infrastructure with the community.

The pilot program will be tracker and log-data based, which means that participants won’t need to do any major technical integrations or adopt workflow changes. This kind of painless “integration” (if you can even call it that) has always been a major focus of ours, as we know it’s what will enable advertisers to continue to operate efficiently.

“As an agency, we have always been committed to bringing a transparent buying eco-system to our clients. By partnering with Lucidity, we’re now able to clearly define where and what we are buying without the need of expensive third party audits or heavy data log transfer,” said David Lee, Agency Programmatic Group Lead at The Richards Group. “Lucidity’s platform allows us to highlight the true value we bring to our clients, and we’re thrilled to be able to pilot the program with both Lucidity and our longtime client GameStop, who both share our view that blockchain can revolutionize the digital buying ecosystem.”

Partners have also been invited to provide input on development to assist in shaping the technology moving forward.

Alongside Lucidity, a number of other blockchain companies will be contributing to the IAB pilot program, including FusionSeven, Kochava, and MetaX. We’re looking forward to learning from one another over the course of this pilot for the betterment of the industry, and we believe our fellow blockchain companies will benefit from our Layer 2 infrastructure as well.

On that point, our CEO Sam Kim might say it best:

“There has been a lot of hype about blockchain, but no industry-backed, practical validation of its value for digital advertising — until now. It is vital that we begin testing and utilizing blockchain technology to address major pain points in programmatic from data discrepancies to supply chain transparency. We are excited to work with the IAB Tech Lab and other members to uncover insights and learnings that can drive the entire industry forward.”

For more info, you can:

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Check out our whitepaper → https://lucidity.tech/whitepaper/

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Originally published at lucidity.tech on July 17, 2018.