The Revolutionary Impact of Blockchain on the Marketing and Advertising Industry.
Tags: blockchain, marketing, cryptocurrency, technology
Published: 2021-05-18 07:05:55

Remember the days when business people saw Blockchain through hype-filled presentations and cryptocurrency whitepapers? Some saw it as an easy chance to get big bucks, while others were afraid of the "Wild West" impression put on crypto markets by the press. Eventually, most of the ideas have faded away. In 2019, almost nobody I know confuses Blockchain with bitcoin, and that's the beginning and the end of the recent achievements that we can begin with.   

In less than two years, Blockchain has risen from the very niche, little-known, and widely misunderstood technology behind cryptocurrencies, to the top of the hype cycle, both among startups and businesses. According to Deloitte's last year's survey, 95 percent of companies were investing in the Blockchain.   

Indeed, the international blockchain technology industry is expected to grow from $1.57 (2018) to around $162.84 billion (2027)—(Research and Markets)—but I believe this is because entrepreneurs have turned their attention to different goals and have begun to see blockchain technology as a critical tool for reimagining advertising and marketing strategies, management, tracking, and customer interaction.   

Companies expect to use the blockchain model for business transactions, exchanges, and online marketplaces, and most are looking to use blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman. This is why blockchain technology causes severe disruption to specific industries that rely on intermediaries.    

That's why Blockchain has been so crucial to recent developments in digital advertising. It's a new way to do business, and it's going to help us make better choices in our companies.     

Innovation is changing the way people communicate with brands and businesses. 

Advertisers need to be able to keep up with the constant evolution of the Internet. The Blockchain has changed the way consumers control and share their personal information.  

This suggests that advertisers need to change the ways in which the data is collected and stored we need to learn how to make better use of social media, email and other forms of communication;  

we need to learn how to use advertising platforms more effectively;  
we need to learn how to make the Internet safer and more secure, and  
we need to learn how to share consumer personal information.    
To do this, we need a new set of tools that will allow us to achieve these goals in the future. One such tool is the Blockchain.   

Blockchain technology not only allows us to create new digital assets without having to rely on any third party to validate them— it also allows advertisers to monitor their audiences and actions on social media platforms; it's not just a distributed ledger that can be used to record transactions between parties without trusting anyone else— but it's also a way for companies to monitor their operations.    

Understanding consumers' emotional responses to ads as well as their perceptions of them 

The quality of the content in which the advertisement appears to consumers is essential and has a significant impact on the brand's fondness. Marketers need to take action and continue to make a concerted effort to ensure that ads are run in high-quality environments, not only to reach out to consumers, but also to make better connections with them.   

High-quality environments will better equip marketers to plan their digital campaigns. 

In a recent study commissioned by Integral Ad Science (IAS) suggests that consumers have different neurological reactions to ads in environments of varying quality. Ads, along with high-quality content, produced significantly higher brain activity associated with positive increases in resilience, engagement, and memorability.   

As a follow-up to this study, IAS conducted additional research among a sample of 1,000 survey respondents in the United States to quantify and understand the perceived importance of content quality for both brands and consumers. Does the perception of the consumer's brand change when faced with the difference in the environmental quality of the advertisement? The results of the neurological study echoed the findings of this survey.   

Content quality matters slightly more than personal content  

The quality of the environment in which digital ads are placed is important to consumers. Approximately 83% of US consumers claim that it is essential that the ads they see are placed next to high-quality content. This is slightly more than the percentage of US consumers that attach high importance to advertisements that are personally relevant, which was measured at 80 percent.   

Consumers will not engage with ads in low-quality environments 53 percent of US consumers also claim that they are more likely to engage with ads adjacent to high-quality content, which is significantly higher than 13 percent who say they would engage with adjacent low-quality content. This creates opportunities for marketers to enhance consumer engagement with their brand not only by tailoring their ads to make them personally relevant to the consumer but also by ensuring that ads are in high-quality content environments.   

Ads in low-quality environments annoy the majority of consumers Consumer perceptions are affected by content and the environment. 81% of US consumers find it annoying to see a brand appear next to low-quality content. Subsequently, more than half (52 percent) would feel less favorable to the brand if their ads were to look in addition to low-quality content. In fact, 62 percent of consumers said that they would even stop using the products or services of a brand because of adjacency and low-quality advertising content. At the end of the day, ads that are placed in low-quality environments cause negative feelings among consumers to the detriment of the brands of marketers.   

Responsibility and control  

According to the recent IAS Brand Safety Survey, only 37% of marketers feel that they are responsible for brand safety. Brands look to and rely on tech partners to ensure that their ads do not appear on low-quality sites or alongside unsafe content that is not suitable for their brands. Interestingly, while 63 percent of marketers feel that they are not responsible for brand safety, 63 percent of consumers hold brands accountable for the content that appears next to advertisements.   

Blockchain technology can solve many pain points  

In fact, improved efficiency due to reduced need for intermediaries is just a few infamous benefits of using Blockchain in real-world business applications. If you are the executive decision-maker of a digital advertising company, you may want to consider integrating Blockchain into your processes to take advantage of the following benefits:  

Faster processing times and lower costs.    
I am improving the transparency and accountability of all parties involved in the transaction.    
The ability to monitor and control transactions without any intervention by third parties.    
The ability to store and transfer data securely.    
The opportunity to build new products and services on the basis of blockchain technology.    
The ability to perform cryptocurrency transactions.    
Ability to use smart contracts and other electronic tokens as payment methods.    
Ability to manage multiple accounts and processes.    
The ability to automate repetitive activities, such as the purchase of a product or service.    
The opportunity to provide instant feedback and suggestions to clients.    
The ability to track customer behavior and improve the customer experience.    
All of these applications will be easily accessible to everyone in the next few years, but this is already happening in the world of advertising.   

Startups use Blockchain to solve pain points for their customers.  

The customer decides who will have access to their data and will be informed at any time that the company uses the information to make a bid available to them. Organizations use their searches for services and products to get customized deals on the open search app for users. The data collected from these transactions may be used to make a decision as to where the item should go, what it should do, and when it should be made available.    

In addition to the above advantages, Blockchain can also give advertisers new opportunities to use blockchain technology to improve their data storage security. Blockchain will help ensure that advertisers eliminate fraudulent communication, and provide more excellent protection for all participants without the involvement of mediators. It also allows companies to track how much money they are spending on advertisements and other marketing activities. This is an essential step towards the future of advertising.     

Big business companies already use the Blockchain to record activities with a higher level of certainty. It is not just about the data being processed anymore, but now it's also about accountability and transparency. Companies like Google, Twitter, and several other major companies have been using blockchain technology.  

Nonetheless, before blockchain technology is fully adopted by the advertising industry, many obstacles need to be tackled.  

The first challenge is to connect customers and brands.    
The second challenge is to strengthen trust between advertisers and marketers.    
The third challenge is to build a transparent system for advertisers, marketers, and brands that also protect the privacy of consumer data. 
Transparency is an essential topic in the advertising world today.   

Many significant advertisers have long felt a lack of clarity in their relationships with media agencies. Companies that purchase large media often find themselves asking: what are we paying for? Are we getting all we're entitled to out of our money?  

Advertisers are currently concerned about agency transparency — or lack of transparency— in three primary areas: media rebates, program fees, and data and technology sharing/ownership. 

Media rebates.  

Agencies often do not disclose or forward discounts (also known as Agency Volume Bonuses or AVBs) to their clients that they receive from media companies. 

Programmatic fees.  

Programmatic digital media purchases often carry difficult-to-understand and sometimes opaque agency fees whose face value is small — pennies per activation — but can add up when the numbers involved reach millions. 

Data and tech sharing/ownership

Typically, agencies share only the data generated by ad-tech platforms, which may not provide clients with an optimal view. They are also in charge of parts of a customer's tech stack, even though advertisers can achieve more data transparency and control by running the stack in-house. 

Blockchain will transform the purchase of ads for digital marketing  

One of the best features of Blockchain technology is its transparency. Most of the time, digital marketers put up ads, they put them through middlemen like Google and Facebook, and they can only rely on the analytics provided by these middlemen. As such, they can not really be sure that the statistics presented to them are entirely accurate. Blockchain can change this with its transparency feature, which will enable analysts to study transparent but encrypted chains in order to see the actual results of ads as customers interact with them. 

Digital Marketers can access to full customer profiles  

Blockchain innovation will close the ways to the conventional techniques utilized by advertisers to gain buyer information. Advertisers will have no real option except to either buy or remunerate shopper data and information. Along these lines, buyers will eagerly present their right data, giving exact information that advanced advertisers can use to dispatch focused on showcasing efforts with potential extreme client profiles. 

Four steps to greater transparency.  

Blockchain technology has been used by many companies to improve customer experience and lower costs by allowing brands to provide more personalized service. Advertisers may create a more open, partner-like partnership with their brands and marketing agencies by taking four steps. 

How Blockchain can help digital marketing  

Companies will identify potential advertising opportunities for emerging Blockchain and digital marketing trends   
Researchers will make recommendations for the digital marketing application through Blockchain technology and provide guidance and data support for influential people who can act on it.   
Researchers will define and accelerate the effectiveness of Blockchain advertising with the publication of regular and ad hoc reports.   
Experts will create guidelines on how businesses should incorporate Blockchain advertising in order to improve their business operations. 
Blockchain data privacy  

Privacy is one of the concerns of using blockchain technology in the advertising sector, and while that is a result of the origins of Blockchain of cryptocurrency, for that advertising space, privacy often seems to be counter-productive. 

Adopting blockchain ad technologies can help market owners to better target audiences, share data, make users safer and more personal, and democratize who controls the advertising that the business relies on. 

Blockchain Media —– Opportunities for Marketers and Publishers 

The ability to use blockchain technology in ads is an excellent way for advertisers and marketers to boost their advertising campaigns. This allows companies to build new revenue streams by creating new ways to access content that the market demands. 

Monetization:  

A blockchain content distribution platform recently launched Publiq, a "rewarding" system that will enable authors and developers to share material on the Blockchain and charge for it instantly. 

Advanced TV:  

The new technology for Comcast's digital marketing group allows advertisers to enable advertisement buys on both broadcast and OTT TV leveraging blockchain technology. The alliance, which brings together Disney, Altice USA, UK Channel 4, and TG1 in Italy, helps advertisers, distributors, and developers to share data without needing to pool it anywhere. A CPG marketer, for instance, would be able to use the information of a content producer like Hulu to know how to direct its sales despite having the actual data. 

Whitelisting:  

MetaX now operates an adChain database in partnership with DMA and ConsenSys, which utilizes an adToken token, which encourages people to decide whether or not the author can be whitelisted (or is deemed to be trustworthy or not). 

Conclusion 

Blockchain is a big deal for marketers and publishers too. It's not just startups and bleeding-edge companies that are investing in Blockchain. When advertisers, marketers, and publishers all take of the Blockchain to uphold industry-wide standards, the company can only become healthier.