The boom of online advertising
That a lot of money is being spent in the world of online advertising is no secret. That we will be adding to it in the coming years? That too sounds logical, because the results are there. Moreover, they are measurable and provide a lot of data about the target audience and how it interacts with those ads. Digital marketing is clearly booming, but that also brings its share of problems.
Research from Forrester shows that media budgets for online ads in the U.S. will rise to as much as $120 billion a year. Unfortunately, if we don't change the way we regulate those online ads, much of that budget will be wasted on fraud.
Online advertising is booming, but it also opens the door for fraud.
Troubling? Quite. Online advertising is becoming less secure, and therefore less authentic. Trust is broken and long-term relationships are ruined. And let that last one be exactly what you actually want to achieve. That's a problem. A problem that blockchain could solve.
Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) is turning the world upside down
The advertising system now works like this: as an advertiser, you pay a certain amount of money to an intermediary, so that your ideal target audience will see your ads and hopefully interact with your brand. So both advertiser and consumer must interact via an intermediary. Usually that "intermediary" is Google or Facebook. With blockchain, those intermediaries would no longer be there, or at least become a lot less powerful. You retain control, which eliminates fraud, and the data just stays in your possession.
Paying for interaction with BAT
This is already happening, with a little brother of bitcoin: BAT (Basic Attention Token). With that digital token, advertisers pay out a certain amount to consumers who make the effort to view the advertisement. Thus, this payment system excludes the middleman, AND they enjoy the benefits that direct relationships bring. In the future, if this process spreads, consumers will be paid to interact, and thus use their data. And that will turn the entire advertising world upside down.
So that also means that the ads themselves automatically become much more relevant, and every penny spent on online advertising becomes worthwhile. Especially if you combine that with a browser like Brave. A browser with a kind of built-in ad blocker, which allows you to choose which type of ads you want to see by indicating what content you are interested in. Now that's quality!
New way of making appointments
Blockchain also opens the way to complete transparency. It also results in smart contracts. These are programmed agreements, recorded in blockchain. That way, no party can influence or change an agreement. Not even in transactions.
This has implications for influencer marketing, for example. One of the biggest problems with this type of marketing is distrust. Will my influencer fulfill his/her promises? As an influencer, will I get the promised commission? How can I check this myself? Are you entering into a professional influencer relationship? With smart contracts, you could monitor those relationships much better. Are all conditions met, along both sides of the story? Only then does a transaction take place.
The promised blockchain country in 1, 2, ...
Very nice stories, but of course there are still a lot of critics. People cry out that blockchain really does have an application for everything with enormous potential, but at the same time it seems that the system is still too complicated to really use. First find a standard, then move on to deployment. We shall see!