Get more ‘bang for your buck’ with ads via blockchain

from Truth Media, the team behind the Truth Data Cloud

As Marc Pritchard of Proctor and Gamble now infamously said, the ad industry is “murky at best, and fraudulent at worst”.

The portion of the ad industry that this statement rings truest is digital media — specifically, programmatic media. The digital supply chain is in poor shape. There are several intermediaries that sit between brands and publishing platforms and each takes a cut of the campaign budget, but quite often these intermediaries overstate their value or don’t disclose the true cost of their margins.

As a result brands have become sceptical around programmatic media as they do not know where a lot of their money is going. Many brands will undertake costly forensic audits (typically 6–12 months after campaigns have ended) to verify where in the ecosystem their budgets have ended up.

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to review the outcome of a $6.4m campaign that took place over a 12 month period. The findings surprised everyone — just 7% of advertising dollars reached the consumer which is well below the industry average of 40%!!

Anonymised Media Spend from a named client

Now let’s look at what happens when we apply blockchain to the media trading model as a way to manage the programmatic supply chain. Blockchain is a great technology for verification as it can record campaign data into a single distributed ledger, which intermediaries and suppliers can then use to verify activity on a granular level. In this way it is possible to build trust and transparency into the supply pathway.

World’s first Blockchain enabled programmatic media campaign

In March this year Truth Media, the team behind the Truth Data Cloud, ran a pilot campaign to test its blockchain tech alongside media partners Avocet, Sonobi and The Guardian. During the campaign log-level data was placed into the blockchain using our contracting platform as a backbone through which to verify activity. The campaign ran for ten days and was widely reported at the time.

We deployed a legally binding contract (code) to the blockchain that described agreed fee structures and the spend allocated to each supplier involved in the chain. During the campaign suppliers push data into the Truth blockchain solution and code was executed to ensure that each impression was delivered in accordance with the details of the contract. The results were presented by our CEO Mary Keane Dawson and CTO Oliver Southgate at Adweek this year.

Transparency means accountability

We found that a much greater portion of the client budget made its way to publishers from the Truth programmatic campaign. The campaign achieved better quality inventory delivered by Private Market Place and Open Exchange due to greater yield achieved by the publisher. The client’s budget was able to work 10x harder during the campaign, not after the fact.

Truth made the clients budget work 130% harder than the industry average working media dollar

Ultimately our test campaign showed that it is possible to apply blockchain today to relieve industry pain points, raising standards and challenging inefficient and wasteful supply chains. Programmatic media verification can now be bought forward to near real-time allowing contracted parties identify anomalies and spot behaviour that wasn’t contractually agreed. This gives scope for brands to adapt their campaigns on the fly and to achieve ‘more bang for their buck’.

Truth are a different kind of agency.

Join us on Telegram to follow our progress and learn about the Truth Data Cloud project, our blockchain-based consumer data dApp.