How blockchain can ensure full accountability in digital advertising

OFTEN times, companies spending on digital advertising find themselves in a quandary over the transparency of figures given to them by publishers.

Concurrently, the publishers are also faced with incensed target audiences who have installed as blocking software, while the audiences simply do not want to be swamped by unsolicited advertisements. Briefly said, the digital ecosystem can be quite a messy place.

According to PwC’s Entertainment Media & Outlook 2017-2021, the online advertising market will grow at a rate of 9.9 percent and will be worth US$116 billion by 2021, making digital advertising market more than 50 percent larger than TV advertising, the Cointelegraph pointed out.

With the rise of digital advertising in the past decade, publishers have been able to make money by generating traffic – much of which involved the popular pay-per-click system where the publishers get paid more in tandem with the higher rate clicks or impressions on any ad.

Invariably, this has led to abuse from certain publishers who have somewhat deceived their clients with bogus numbers by using automated bots.

Another challenge is that more than 600 million people have installed ad-blocking software to stop their email inboxes and or favoured websites to be filled with advertisements, and the number of users is growing by the day.

Accountability in blockchain

The digital advertising world may begin to embrace blockchain and stakeholders can expect it to be effective in ensuring accountability. The stakeholders can also expect better results for their ad campaigns as the technology will completely disregard fraudulent traffic and record only actual conversions.

The Cointelegraph cited the book The CMO Primer For The Blockchain World, in which Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing,  states that:

“Any industry that is full of intermediaries has a lot of value lost along the transaction path, and lacks transparency and trust is an industry that is ripe for blockchain-driven disruption.”

He said it was not surprising blockchain-based protocols and technologies are seeking change how digital advertising is purchased, delivered, measured, and valued.

Epstein told Cointelegraph that a decentralized ad tech protocol, with independently verified actors with a good long-standing reputation, will provide people with the transparency they needed.

The technology would also enable them to precisely know who is paying for the ad they are seeing and whether the company or individual could be trusted while reducing the instances of fraud and increase accountability.

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