The industry, however, has been plagued by a maze of middle parties, not always in human form - a recent estimate suggests that up to half of current ad traffic is managed and generated by bots. With fierce competition in most "business-to-customer" and "business-to-business" industries, businesses are paying more than ever to make sure their message gets to the right place, at the right time.
Market research firm Forrester predicts digital marketing spending in the United States alone could reach $ 120 billion by 2021.
How Blockchain Can Change Marketing
The global advertising market has been hit hard by a multitude of middlemen and fraudulent behavior, with fraudulent robots alone inflicting more than $ 7.2 billion in losses in 2016.
Marketing is expected to experience a significant disruption on the blockchain, revolutionizing martech and especially advertising. In the context of a larger marketing chain, it is easy to envision advertising platforms where all relevant performance and audience information is processed and processed by a decentralized ledger.
Adding blockchain to the overly complicated modern ad industry equation removes a lot of confusion about marketing variables such as the specifics of ad serving. When a business sends a request to an advertising ledger for a specific message, they can then check back once the request is satisfied to benefit from an immutable record of delivery time, duration and performance of the business. ad.
The decentralized nature of the blockchain in this case could help usher in a new era of transparency and efficiency for a company's advertising efforts. This would reduce the risk of fraudulent traffic reports, eliminate the middlemen needed to fulfill the advertisement request, and allow multiple advertisement requests to be made simultaneously.
According to a Forrester Research article, for every dollar the average business invests in advertising, it only receives about $ 0.44 in return.
With the increase in advertising efforts of a single company has been accompanied by growing mistrust on the part of the general public. Hundreds of ad blockers and privacy shields, tech quirks and browser extensions help hundreds of millions of users bypass trackers and skew usage statistics every day.
While this sense of mistrust doesn't go away overnight, the public, immutable option of a ledger could help a particular ad network bridge this gap by showing consumers exactly how data is used and who it is. sold.
Blockchain technology also enables the distribution of tokens through which the final ad recipient can have better control over the ads they watch and in some cases can even receive market-determined compensation for their attention. , which would add a new interactive dimension to the world of online marketing.
Blockchain and data at a glance
When it comes to digital marketing, the ROI of a potential advertising campaign isn't the only factor for success. What is even more important is the collection of massive amounts of data that each potential customer produces on a daily basis. The “big data” revolution has allowed companies to benefit from an astonishing amount of business intelligence and user knowledge, in order to better adjust their advertising strategy, brand visibility and, above all, product development. .
Currently, the majority of ad traffic is centralized on social media and internet traffic giants, such as Google or Facebook, which make sure that every post that reaches their users gets a significant profit.
In addition, centralizing usage data on their platform allows them to control the information it generates and generate significant revenue by selling it to potential buyers. Blockchain in marketing projects pose a serious threat to traditional avenues of digital marketing, threatening to undermine the pwork of these large companies.
In turn, users have much more control over their data and individual companies are able to reach them directly. For example, it's easy to envision a blockchain-based search engine, where users can directly choose what types of data they're willing to share with a potential advertiser. By doing this, the advertiser can purchase the data directly from the user rather than from the platform that hosted the interaction.
Blockchain and Influencer Marketing
The rise of social media in particular has added another flavor to the exciting work of digital marketing, namely the arrival of influencers.
By the late 2010s, this social media phenomenon had spread across most industries - authority points and knowledge leaders can influence public opinion and conversions across a variety of verticals, from consumer and fashion, business-to-business and financial investments.
A blockchain-based, trustless influencer network can help businesses bypass the high fees charged by nascent influencer agencies, while smart contracts can help enforce both publisher and performer. to meet their commitments in a quantifiable manner.
Overall, the arrival of the blockchain in marketing and advertising can be seen as bittersweet for the entire industry. This is because it might make some marketing professions powerless, because it bypasses unnecessary middlemen and third parties.
For a single business, however, blockchain-based ad networks have the potential to dramatically improve marketing activities and propel them towards greater ad delivery accuracy and user responsiveness.