Join IAB Tech Lab on May 7th in NYC for our Open Forum AdTech in Blockchain: It’s Working to see how blockchain technology is being deployed in digital advertising. This is the latest edition in our series of events to educate the industry on blockchain technology and its application. In this event we will focus on what is working today with product demonstrations from AdNode, AdEx, and RTBAsia. The panel discussions will dive deep into key topics like cryptocurrency or coins use in adtech, cryptography and how it can support transparency and authentication in adtech transactions, and how blockchain brings efficiency in reconciling campaign data. We will also present updates on blockchain working group initiatives including the Transparency Primer, PrivacyChain and Network Pilot results along with updates on industry and regulatory environment. For inquiries regarding this event please email techlab@iabtechlab.com. Sponsorship opportunities are available.

18 Nov 2020 Jim Killock

When we first took on the ad industry we knew it would not be simple. The ad industry is making a great deal of money, often at the expense of publishers as well as our privacy. But we did expect the Regulator to play their role in fixing the problem.

The initial steps were promising. The ICO investigated the issues in our complaint and wrote a highly critical report, finding the industry to not be complying with the GDPR. That was no surprise to us, as our complaint outlined how the AdTech industry could not comply with the basic premises of the data protection regime. 

The ICO also held two industry-wide meetings, where the industry could not provide answers to our complaints. Google and the Internet Advertising Bureau introduced changes to their systems, with the IAB amending their “trust and consent framework” and Google making some changes to the manner in which personal data is disseminated across the AdTech ecosystem. 

However, while those changes were welcomed by the ICO as progress, the truth is the changes were very cosmetic and did not cure the problems and data protection concerns that we had raised. There was nothing that looks like substantive meaningful change in practice.

The net result is that we have been bitterly disappointed. Two years after Michael Veale and I filed a formal complaint to the ICO, the actual results to improve the industry are very poor.

The “pause” to investigations during the COVID-19 period was also highly disappointing. There was no reason to shut down this process, even temporarily. The abuse continues at huge scale and needs resolving. Other data protection authorities in Europe are continuing with their processes, and are beginning to get results.

When we asked questions about the pause in the investigation and when the ICO will start taking steps to address the conduct that the ICO had found to be unlawful, the ICO did not engage with. Instead, the ICO took the decision to shut down our Complaint entirely rather than answer our questions and keep us updated.

This is an extraordinary action. If the ICO is entitled to shut down a complaint, without progressing those complaints at all and not providing any update for a number of months then what is the point of the Complaint process? How can the ICO be said to acting to protect data subjects when there is no resolution about conduct the regulator has identified as breaching basic rights?

The ICO’s position is not just startling for our Complaint, but also speaks to a broken regulatory system. If the ICO’s position is correct, the ICO could decide not to act on any complaint. It would have complete discretion to find widespread abuse but ignore it, as it has done with our Complaint.

Our point is simply that we as data subjects are entitled to a remedy. Regulators, when they find systemic abuse, need to regulate. Which brings us to the other, age old question: who watches the watchers? Who is the regulator accountable to?

The GDPR provides for a data subject to have an “effective remedy” against a decision of a Supervisory Authority, namely, the ICO. That “effective remedy” takes the form of a statutory appeal under s.166 of the Data Protection Act. Unfortunately, that statutory appeal route has been interpreted narrowly by the Tribunal to date.

We therefore want to both have the decision to close our Complaint scrutinised and to ensure that the rights of data subjects against the ICO are upheld in full. It is not enough to complain about the law and the inaction by the regulator. We are here to change those laws and conduct.

That is why then we are going to the Information Tribunal. We must seek a remedy and accountability for the ICO through the mechanism that was envisaged under GDPR to do this. It is extremely important that this mechanism is made to work. The ICO must be accountable, complaints must be resolved, and, ultimately, the AdTech industry must be made to operate within the law.

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Read more about the Ending illegal online advertising campaign

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are proposing a new system for buying and registering domains on the web-based on blockchain technology. Conventionally, setting up and accessing websites over the Internet requires the use of the Domain Name System (DNS), which effectively acts like a phonebook for the Internet. Businesses called domain name registrars lease domain name registrations to the general public. Records of global registrations are centralised and kept by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for managing and coordinating the Domain Name System to ensure that every address is unique and that all users of the Internet can find all valid addresses. It also oversees and coordinates the distribution of unique IP addresses and domain names, and that each domain name maps to the correct IP address. By contrast, blockchain-based domains rely on a blockchain made up of complex smart contracts to create and maintain websites, which have their content stored on a decentralised network. This means there is no single database with records of the domains and their current owners. One of the most well-known examples of a blockchain based domain system was developed by cryptocurrency platform Ethereum and is called the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Much like the domain name system translates IP addresses into simple, easily readable names, blockchain-based domains converts complicated and long cryptocurrency addresses into human-friendly strings. The primary purpose of the system is to simplify cryptocurrency payments, by allowing users to create a single website which acts as their crypto wallet. However, more recently Draper Associates and Boost VC launched Unstoppable Domains, which makes bolder claims about the capabilities of blockchain domains. While the main focus of Unstoppable Domains is also on cryptocurrency payments, it promises another feature – the ability to build unregulated, uncensorable, and unremovable websites. MyBroadband spoke to South Africa’s Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) and Luno Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Timothy Stranex to understand the potential and dangers of this technology. Stranex said that it was important that decentralised systems like Unstoppable Domains were available as alternatives to centralised systems like ICANN, due to the possibility of censorship. “One of the reasons is that centralised systems are always subject to geopolitics,” Stranex said. He said the US planning to ban TikTok and China banning certain US  companies were examples of this and stated that these types of restrictions could be extended to domain names. “A court can order a registrar to remove or expropriate a DNS domain name whereas it cannot do so for a blockchain domain name,” Stranex explained. While this would be ideal in a situation where a site is blocked or removed for seemingly unjustifiable reasons, it creates another problem. If a site were to host illegal content like pirated movies or child pornography, or acts as a platform for illegal activities including black market weapon trading or human trafficking, there would be no way of shutting it down. However, while blockchain based domains are not subject to regulation from ICANN, they use an alternate root which requires certain modifications to certain network settings to be accessed. Unstoppable Domains currently offers its own browser and a plug-in for the Chrome browser to facilitate this. This means that although it may be impossible to shut down a website once created using its blockchain-based systems, access to the site can still be limited by Unstoppable Domains or any third party which provides access to its alternate root. In the event that a blockchain-based website hosts either illegal content or content that is deemed inappropriate, it can therefore still be censored. This was one of the reasons ISPA disagreed with the idea that blockchain-based domains can be a general-purpose replacement for DNS. It said the fact that blockchain domains require the use of alternative DNS roots subverts the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) processes and creates a “new source of truth”. “They effectively fragment the Internet and create a separate parallel version of it that is only accessible to the subset of consumers that have bought into their alternative root.” “At best this creates confusion when one consumer doesn’t know why their friend is able to access something they cannot. At worst, it results in namespace collisions,” ISPA said. For example, the current top-level domains used by Unstoppable Domains are .crypto and .zil. Since these strings are not reserved in the mainstream DNS, another party can apply to ICANN to establish them as a new gTLD. Another problem was that the transaction performance of blockchains is not well-suited to the swift changes happening on the Internet. “Traditional hierarchical DNS is designed to ensure changes can happen quickly and responses can be cached.” “Blockchain, on the other hand, is designed to ensure transactions cannot be repudiated, and this comes at the cost of agility,” ISPA explained. “It is hard to envision a blockchain-based solution being able to handle the traditional CDN world where DNS may change every minute, and different geographies get different answers,” ISPA said. Stranex submitted that blockchain domain technology may be insufficient at scale. However, he added that it could be used to cut out middlemen like registrars and TLDs, and avoid reliance on centralised entities. “It may also be easier to trade (buy and sell) domain names – this is possible with normal domain names but is extremely clunky and requires escrow systems,” Stranex noted.

05 November, 2020

In an unprecedented move, the Privacy Campaigners at the Open Rights Group (ORG) have today announced that they are taking the UK’s privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to court over the regulator’s failure to stop unlawful practices by the Digital Advertising Technology (AdTech) industry.

A complaint was made in September 2018 by Jim Killock and Dr Michael Veale to the ICO about the systemic breaches of the GDPR by the AdTech industry, focusing on the role of the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), a trade industry body as the rule setter.

The ICO’s investigation which was concluded in June 2019 found the AdTech industry to be in breach of the GDPR with widespread and systemic problems with industry practices such as collecting and sharing people’s browsing history without any control over who ends up accessing such personal information. [1]

However, despite founding unlawful practices, the ICO decided to close the investigation in September 2020 without taking any substantive action. [2] The ICO had also ‘paused’ enforcement during the first COVID lockdown. [3]

The co-complainants (Jim Killock and Dr Michael Veale) are now taking the regulator to court over its refusal to take substantive action against what their own investigation concluded were very serious and extensive unlawful practices.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and one of the two complainants, said:

“The AdTech industry has driven a coach and horses through the GDPR and the ICO’s own investigation has highlighted widespread systemic abuses in the AdTech industry practices. But instead of taking action against, it has decided to close the investigation. We are determined to ensure that the law is enforced even when the regulator can’t be bothered to protect our rights and liberties.”

Dr Michael Veale, an academic at the University College London (UCL) who sits on the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group and is a co-complainant against the AdTech industry to the ICO, said:

“The ICO is expected to protect individuals against complex misuses of their sensitive data by entire industries acting outside the law, not just the simple, low-hanging fruit it can easily enforce against. This lawsuit is about stopping the ICO sweeping the most difficult cases under the carpet. Adtech isn’t simple — but dealing with illegal adtech is the ICO’s job.”

Ravi Naik, Legal Director of the data rights agency AWO who is instructed to act on behalf of the complainants, said: 

“Our clients simply want to the ICO to act to prevent widespread and systemic abuses of human rights; abuses that the ICO has acknowledged occur. Rather than take steps to address those problems, the ICO have acted against our clients and closed their complaints because our clients asked them to take action. This appalling state of affairs has left our clients with little option than to take the Commissioner to the Tribunal. That the Commissioner is being taken to the Tribunal because of a refusal to act to protect our rights speaks volumes of the Commissioner’s record. “Our clients seek no more than the protection of our rights. Why the Commissioner is refusing to act to protect us all is a matter they will have to justify to the Tribunal.”

ORG are seeking donations to cover the cost of the challenged.

ENDS 

Al Ghaff 07951265812 / press@openrightsgroup.org  

Notes to the Editor:

[1] ime-bidding-report-201906.pdf The ICO’s investigation concluded that:

[2] See correspondence between ICO and ORG, available on request

[3] 5/ico-statement-on-adtech-work/

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HomeC-Suite AdvisoryThe Greatest Challenge In Our Industry: Trust Dec. 28, 2018 at 11:11 amC-Suite AdvisoryThe Greatest Challenge In Our Industry: TrustMatt WasserlaufC-Suite AdvisoryDecember 28, 2018 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); It’s lost. The Digital Ad Industry has been struggling with this for some time and when Mark Zuckerberg faced Congress sporting the tie that he’s refused to wear for the entirety of his 15-year career at Facebook, it marked the nadir. So what can our industry do to solve this trust problem? There is no silver bullet but I’ll offer three suggestions that can put us on the right path. First of all, we need to promote “responsible growth” and not growth at all costs.  For as long as I can remember, the industry has been VC-fueled which drives most start-ups to do things they don’t want to do.  I’ve watched this up close with a competitor of mine called Videology.  Backed by VC powerhouse NEA among others, Videology had to pivot and grow its business in ways that were irresponsible. The business started in advanced TV, pivoted to online video and ultimately ran at the programmatic business all in the span of its ten years in business. While the company never did any of these things well, it ultimately lost tens of millions of dollars and at last went bankrupt leaving an industry full of publishers holding the bag of significant losses. I don’t mean to just jump on one bad actor as there were many more who ran fraudulent campaigns in order to drive revenue at all costs for its investors.  In a 4q campaign for Papa John’s back in 2014, my company Torrential ran alongside most of the other video suppliers and produced the only real click-through rate of the campaign.  All the others, which included companies such as Yume, Videology, AOL and YouTube had CTR at or near zero suggesting a lot of very bad/fraudulent inventory.  Torrential’s CTR was around 3-4% by contrast.  No CTR is a sign that no one is watching or seeing the ad impressions. This irresponsible growth is not a secret.  Prevalent fraud across the industry has given rise to a cottage industry of “view ability” companies such as Moat, Integral Ad Science, and Doubleverify who’s job it is to make sure people actually “viewed” the ad!  It didn’t have to be this way and shouldn’t going forward.  We must prioritize “responsible growth” over growth at all costs if we’re going to solve the trust issue.  It’s not easy to do, but must be done. The second suggestion toward solving trust in the digital ad industry is human involvement along with the technological automation.  This is something the leader in the industry, Google, instituted, though it remains to be seen if they’ve done enough. Google’s YouTube has been caught running its advertisers in front of terrorist videos and hate content.  This led to the pulling of advertisers ranging from P&G to AT&T and prompted the IAB to organize it’s first white paper on the industry’s fraud problem. In response, YouTube announced the hiring of a team of editors to audit incoming content and screen its running in tandem with major brands.  This seems like a great solution for adoption across the board.  As others like YouTube automate more and more of their processes, the idea of human involvement can soften the blow of black and white automation. More human involvement in the Sales process would also be helpful to solve the trust issue in our industry.  More and more automation has come to the sales side of the digital ad industry and not all of it is welcomed.  Programmatic platforms have accelerated that trend and while long-term, programmatic will be a mainstay, today it’s driving a lot of poor execution.  Salespeople in place to help manage this work would go a long way toward easing this transition.  Buyers would do well by hearing from someone (phone calls seem to be a way of the past) to help walk through the growing pains.  Hand holding has worked in the media industry for over 50 years and it’s comeback can go a long way towards solving the issue of trust today. The final suggestion I offer with regard to solving trust in Digital Advertising is Blockchain.  This is an area I’m specifically leaning into with a new company called Video ICO.  Blockchain, at its core, is a public digital ledger.  It provides the platform that verifies and validates business through a distributed network of “nodes” and removes any misinterpretation of parties by making transactions permanent across the blockchain.  The IAB issued its first white paper on Blockchain in February 2018 and offered it up as a potential solution to the industry as well. Unfortunately for Blockchain, crypto-currency has gone a long way toward tarnishing the reputation of the technology.  Bitcoin has gone sky high in value and has fallen almost as hard.  The fortunes made in Blockchain have attracted a lot of bad actors and has stolen the headlines away from Blockchain’s real virtues.  But this story has a strong analogy and that analogy was the beginnings of the very Digital Industry we’re working so hard to restore trust in.  We’ve seen this movie before and we can predict that Blockchain’s real value will come to the forefront.  Maybe it can also save trust in the Digital Ad Industry too. These are my suggestions to restoring faith and trust in the $50 Billion Digital Ad Biz. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); # RANKED: The World’s Top 10 Richest Countries (2017-2027). # Revealed: Top Rated Visitor Attractions In Every Country In The World. # The World’s Most (And Least) Expensive Cities For Taxis, 2018.

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The Marketers Guide To Blockchain | AdExchanger Proforma Peak HomeOnline AdvertisingRead ArticleThe Marketers Guide To Blockchain | AdExchangerLast updated: 06-10-2019Read original article hereBlockchain, an unmodifiable and unbreachable digital ledger, was conceived 10 years ago to support the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But it has since seeped into new categories, jumping from finance to health care and, more recently, digital advertising. It's doing so with the backing of big companies like IBM and Comcast, as well as smaller startups like MadHive and Rebel AI.While government-backed legal tender is secured in bank vaults, bitcoin uses a blockchain ledger to guarantee security by providing full transparency around the currency. The ledger tracks each unit of the currency ever created or transacted, and the number of bitcoins held by any individual as well as the path of any single unit of the currency are visible to all.By applying blockchain technology to ad transactions, data owners can securely share their assets without exporting or handing them over to another stakeholder. And media owners can strike a blow against unauthorized sellers and domain spoofers.Blockchains strongest application is for a network where theres mistrust across the stakeholders, said IBMs Media & Entertainment group CTO, Peter Guglielmino.Despite the ad tech communitys interest in blockchain, the potential applications and their level of maturity vary dramatically.So what can blockchain do for the ad industry?Weed out unwanted supply chain intermediaries: Blockchain could help secure the supply chain from intermediaries that manipulate inventory or from third parties like ad blockers.For ousting intermediaries, heres blockchains role: an unethical media seller could trick buyers by creating near-clones of legitimate URLs and tags, like CNN-trending.com or NBCcom.com. A blockchain would stop those capers, since publishers and resellers would be recognizable from their unique blockchain keys instead of gimmicky names, and each unit of inventory would trace back to a true source.Facilitate data sharing: For most companies, their data is among their most valuable assets. So its no wonder that data sharing even with trusted partners can be fraught. But some vendors are pushing blockchain as a means to log data transactions, so data owners know exactly which of its available data assets its partners took, and when.These solutions typically focus on TV ad buying, and require multiple stakeholders to form agreements with each other. In June, IBM formed the AdLedger Consortium with Integral Ad Science, blockchain-based ad tech startup MadHive and Premion OTT ad-buying subsidiary Tegna. The goal is to build a blockchain data-sharing solution geared toward advanced TV advertisers.Comcast also revealed a blockchain-based coalition of broadcasters, including Altice USA, Cox, NBCUniversal and Disney, who would share their data and record those transactions in blockchain. So a vetted, trusted media buyer could execute a campaign against segments provided by members of the Comcast consortium.The process relies on smart contracts, automated protocols that manage transactions on a blockchain. So if Comcast and Cox have different inventory rates for specific content or audiences, or if a buyer wants to blacklist certain supply sources, thats baked into each companys smart contract and dictates how others on the blockchain can access its data.Reselling inventory: NYIAX, a Nasdaq-backed startup that aims to sell media futures contracts over a blockchain, hopes to make advertisers comfortable with buying future inventory contracts. If successful, NYIAX could give pubs more flexibility in how inventory is packaged. Advertisers could lock up inventory over the long term and pubs could score bigger upfront deals or offer different types of discounts. And in this instance, blockchain would serve as the ledger recording all of these transactions and their value.Before anyone gets too excited, remember that blockchain ad tech is still in its infancy and many of the tools supporting the aforementioned applications are still in beta or alpha, or are still as vaporous as an idea.Comcasts blockchain platform isnt expected to go live until 2018. AdLedger is still forming a working group that will dictate policy and API specs for its platform. And NYIAX is still developing proofs of concept with beta partners.Weve talked to hundreds of publishers, all the big holding companies and agencies within them, and its a slow, methodical, phased-in approach, said NYIAX CEO Lou Severine. Itll be some time before were in an RFP-type stage.But blockchain technology is interesting enough such that trade groups are assessing it. The IAB is in an exploratory phase on blockchain and is in talks with startups from the new blockchain ad tech cottage industry, said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab.IBMs Guglielmino said blockchain startups today are using various methods, but as consensus comes to the space, existing systems will be more integrated.He added, Whats important is to set the bar with standards. Then it will be available to anyone to leverage if their companies can step up to that bar and demonstrate value in the chain.Blockchains face tough hurdles in the ad arena. Chief among them: Its too slow to scale.Scaled ad platforms like AppNexus or DoubleClick Ad Exchange process millions of ad calls per second. Bitcoin, meanwhile, handles around five transactions per second.The distributed nature of the blockchain existing and updating alongside every computer on the network around the world is both the benefit and the challenge, said Will Luttrell, co-founder and former CTO of Integral Ad Science who is in a beta phase on blockchain technology startup Curren-C.Blockchains latency makes it impossible, at least for now, to enter the RTB market. Which is partially why early market entrants like Comcasts platform or the AdLedger Consortium are focused more on data sharing and campaign planning than actual media execution.Confirming transactions on a blockchain ledger takes 10-30 seconds, according to Manny Puentes, CEO of the blockchain ad tech startup Rebel AI. Theres going to be a lot of development before they can get that down to the milliseconds used to measure online ad calls.NYIAX works around this issue by selling guaranteed future media and not live inventory.The speed isnt there and, frankly, may never be, Severine said.Whether blockchain transactions will ever fit into an RTB ad tech stack remains an open question for those occupying the market niche.Blockchain ad buying will start with direct deals between media companies and pilot agency or brand partners akin to linear TV contracts due to real-time latency, Gombert said. But once it gets better, and it is, it isnt necessarily limited.Brands and media companies are demanding transparency from digital media but too much of a good thing can hurt you.In addition to scale and speed, theres a transparency issue thats tricky to negotiate, Luttrell said.Consider Comcast's blockchain initative. The broadcasters involved want to expose some data to some buyers, but they dont want other broadcasters on the platform to see what kind of data they share, who they share it with or what rates they charge. Neither do they want their DSPs, SSPs or ad network vendors to be publicly available.Blockchains are incorporating more supply chain stakeholders, said Ken Brook, CEO of blockchain advertising company MetaX. But as you start adding proxies, vendors and data that impacts the logic and delivery of campaigns, it gets technically challenging.MadHive: One of the early advertising blockchains, MadHive is pursuing a partner-driven growth strategy with an early focus on OTT ad budgets. IBM is the first enterprise partner for MadHives AdLedger Consortium, which it hopes will be transacting data-for-data deals, if not actual media buys, by the end of the year. Advanced television is where experimental budgets are happening right now, said founder Adam Helfgott.Rebel AI: This blockchain ad tech startup is hoping to develop direct pipelines between media partners and potential agency or DSP buyers that are more like the verified relationships buyers used to have with media companies, Puentes said. The startups go-to-market play is as a secure buying channel for publishers that want to avoid ad fraud and quality concerns on open programmatic exchanges.MetaX: MetaX is experimenting with a mix of blockchain and off-chain solutions as it tests use cases in online advertising. The company hosts a nonprofit blockchain platform, MetaXchain, while the for-profit entity develops applications that sit on top of its blockchain, like data sharing or attribution tech. The startup is working with one DSP, a brand and an advertising trade group, though none are public, on ways to apply blockchain on behalf of companies that mistrust digital media.Comcast: With its own extensive broadcast portfolio and cable pipes into homes across America, Comcast is pursuing a blockchain data-sharing as a way to allow first-party data matching without the web of intermediaries, like legacy data players Acxiom and Experian, as well as addressable TV ad startups forming a new layer within the broadcast Lumascape, that add value but absorb margins. Comcasts Blockchain Insights Platform has another year and a half before its set to launch from beta, but even with that time educating stakeholders and developing tech integrations is a tall order.NYIAX: Backed by Nasdaqs proprietary blockchain technology, NYIAX aims to let traders buy and sell the rights to future digital media inventory. This would allow online media companies to package guaranteed inventory more like upfront TV deals, though it faces a potential challenge onboarding publishers, who dont think of their inventory as a commodity like salt or corn that can be sold like every unit is equivalent. NYIAX hopes its ad tech Rolodex, with a C-suite made up of former AOL execs and Mediaocean founder and CEO Bill Wise as an investor, will help it get past those sticking points.IBM: The tech giant is in a relatively strong position to establish Bluemix, its cloud-based services suite, as a blockchain frontrunner, Guglielmino said. Ad tech blockchain startups are in the uncomfortable position of finding revenue in a system that doesnt process budgets yet, whereas IBM could stomach the R&D; costs and apply advances in the technology to other industry verticals, like health care and finance.Read the rest of this article hereCategoriesAll CategoriesAdvertisingEcommerceGraphic DesignMarketingMobile MarketingOnline AdvertisingPromotional MerchandiseScreen PrintingSocial Media MarketingWeb Design

Click Here For A FreeOnline & CompetitiveAudit and Analysisof your BusinessCall Now!(805) 642-7504HomeOur ServicesSolutionsIndustriesAbout UsContact usServices AreasArticles Shop Now Shop NowHomeDigital MediaRead Article14 companies using blockchain in advertising in 2019 Last updated: 08-04-2019Read original article hereWhen the first ad exchange launched, when the first true programmatic campaign launched, and when the first video ad launched people took notice. Yet many had their doubts.Blockchain in advertising is similar. To some, its a revolution that will disrupt centralized power in the advertising industrys ecosystem, remove ad fraud, and create complete transparency. To others, its a fad.But regardless of blockchains true capabilities, the timeline to adopting new technologies and innovations continues to shorten. It could take mere months until blockchain technology is a regular in the advertising supply chain. Whether a revolution or a fad, its important that we test blockchain-based ad tech alternatives so that we can re-establish trust in an industry that is rapidly losing it.Over the past three years, Never Stop Marketing tracked 48 companies that aim to decentralize programmatic advertising. Most articles about these companies discuss what will be possible, but not which solutions marketers can use today. By way of example, just under a year ago, we covered22 companiesthat we thought were notable in the space.These companies are focused on five programmatic advertising challenges:This is the list of the companies that weve uncovered with products in market (in alphabetical order) for blockchain in advertising:The promise:AdNode creates accountability by automating the buying and reconciliation process in digital advertising. Automation eliminates the manual invoicing process, increases visibility into the success of campaigns, and increases the efficiency of advertisers media investment. AdNodes platform integrates with the advertisers existing ad measurement vendors, automatically generates invoices, and enables marketers to seamlessly reallocate budgets to their top-quartile performers. AdNode minimizes friction in digital advertising, especially for programmatic preferred and direct campaigns.Success to date: AdNode is running pilot programs with well-known advertisers and publishers. An appealing aspect of AdNodes model is that there is no fee to clients or agencies. The platforms revenue stream is based exclusively on publisher fees.The promise: AdsDax focuses on mobile rich-media campaigns focusing on solving four problems: Fraud, Transparency, consumer data privacy, and consumers connection to brands. They do this by sending ad data from their device directly to the blockchain where is verified and validated by third parties. This transparent data is available to the advertiser almost immediately, allowing them to review what was bought in real-time, so they can spend their dollars more efficiently. Finally, they reward publishers for high-quality inventory.Success to date: Havas ran a pilot with AdsDax: Over the course of the campaign, 2.3 million mobile device users interacted with the advertisement, and AdsDax was able to directly track all user engagements from users mobile devices on a public blockchain. By using a blockchain tracking layer, advertisers were able to more clearly see progress towards their campaign goals.The promise: Amino Payments records every transaction made to help media buyers track exactly where and when money is being spent with each vendor. This exposes and eliminates any hidden costs in media buying contracts, as the negotiator, in this case, is the blockchain itself rather than the companies hoping to profit.Will Luttrell, CEO of Amino, said it best on LinkedIn, There is a solution that will eliminate ad fraud. Not mitigate, not suppress, not investigate: eliminate. It does not involve a new wave of super-sophisticated fraud detection wizardry Ive built a lot of that (and hats off to my allies still fighting in the trenches at the verification companies and teams at Google and other places.)Aminos solution gives brands a simple, complete view of the money trail all the way down to publishers and data vendors. Fraud is made possible when money can be hidden. Transparency solves fraud. That technology is here, right now.Success to date: Some of the worlds largest and forward-thinking brands, agencies, and ad tech partners have joined the Amino Network to say enough. An interesting application of Aminos solution is the ability to determine the actual amount of money lost to fraud and waste. In a recent campaign with Nestl, Integral Ad Science found 3.77% of impressions to be outside of brand safety guidelines. In a typical campaign, Nestl would receive credit for about 3.77% of spend in order to compensate for those unsafe impressions. However, using Amino Payments, Nestl was able to see the exact cost of each unsafe impression which, in total, represented 9.23% of spend. By layering impression-level financial transparency with verification data, Nestl was able to save 5.46% more than what they would have saved without Amino Payments.The promise: Blockchain4Media takes a holistic approach to clean up the programmatic supply chain. They provide transparency into the details of each ad placement with blockchain as the final source of truth for each transaction. Their CPMH (Cost Per Thousand Humans) approach to media buying accountability offers brands and advertisers a way to ensure they are only buying media seen by human beings. Their technology also identifies and provides publisher inventory quality insights and details.Blockchain4Media leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technologies to provide the most advanced media buying possible. Smart fraud detection, advanced levels of viewability, and validation of individual ad placement details allow real-time campaign optimization, cost savings, and higher ROI. Publishers also get viewability into their inventory quality to mitigate potential fraud issues.Success to date:Blockchain4Media launched their first in the market pilot the end of 2018 with one of the worlds largest CPG brands and electronics manufacturer. They identified almost 20% invalid and fraudulent traffic beyond the current in-market solution, and up to 76% fraudulent individual publisher activity. A recent campaign identified over 30% invalid and fraudulent traffic compared to the existing solution. Blockchain4Media is conducting global POCs and market rollouts in the US, EU, and APAC. They are active members of the IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working group and are helping shape the industry blockchain standards.The promise: Blockgraphis an industry initiative led by ComcastsFreeWheel, designed to make data usable across the TV ecosystem in a secure way. At the core of the initiative is the Blockgraph platform, a technology that enables advertisers and media companies to control, connect, and safely activatetheir data at-scale. It does this by allowing each data owner to keep control of their data while connecting into a shared identity layer without exposing any underlying data to third parties.In contrast to how other companies may use blockchain, it is one tool within a broader framework of technologies that Blockgraph employs to deliver its end goal: secure, scalable, data-enabled TV advertising. More specifically, Blockgraph hopes to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of data-driven TV advertising by supporting better planning, targeting, execution, and measurement across screens.Success to date:Blockgraph just celebrated itstwo-year anniversaryand has been working with some of thebiggest companiesin TV, digital video, and advertising across the US and Europe to help drive the next phase of this industry-focused solution. What can we expect in the year ahead? Blockgraph plans a series of pilots with major distributors, programmers, and advertisers that should provide a strong foundation of proof points that the technology is ready to go. According to Jason Manningham, General Manager of Blockgraph, Advertisers want the best of both worlds. They want to use data for their television buys like they do for their digital media buys, yet also get the quality content that TV provides. Fortunately, advertisers are extremely optimisticabout whats currently possible in data-driven TV buying and plan to use data on a growing portion of their TV ad spend going forward.The promise: Brave is a browser that protects consumers privacy and blocks ads. For those who choose to view ads, Brave rewards people for their attention with BAT (Basic Attention Token) and gives users a 70% cut. When consumers opt-in their identity remains anonymous and the platforms blockchain capabilities are able to record accurate and secure data on the consumers engagement for publishers. It is a balance on fraud protection for advertisers and ethical ad targeting that protects the consumer and allows them to control their permissions. Braves BAT was one of the more well known and early ICOs in the ecosystem.Success to date:Brave started opened up their advertising platform in April. By May over 1,300 advertisers were on the waiting list. The ads show up as notifications in your browser and click to a new tab. Reports on Twitter show a 20% CTR in initial campaigns. Over 10 million users have downloaded the Brave Browser.The promise: HQd in the UK, Fenestra focuses on media supply chain transparency for programmatic transactions. These transactions can be recorded, verified and reconciled in a trusted environment, based on HyperLedger Fabric, giving advertisers greater performance from their media investment and an accompanying suite of proprietary supply-path optimization tools.Success to date:Fenestra delivered its first platform product focused on transparency in programmatic supply-chains in late 2018. The company launched its network and dashboard earlier this year with a partnership with Johnson & Jonhsons agency, FourComms Health. Richard Springham, FourComms managing director described the results: FourComms used Fenestra to track J&J;s Nicorette Winter activity. We identified up to 49% performance improvements through Fenestra whom also gave us greater surety over the data we were seeing. The business now counts leading programmatic vendors such as Adobe, Amobee, Oath, Sonobi, and MiQ as data partners.Since launch, the business has been partnering with an accelerating group of digital agencies and advertisers to deliver greater trust and transparency on a cross-platform basis.The promise: IBM has a deep affinity towards Hyperledger, which is an open-source blockchain protocol started by the Linux foundation in which IBM was an early supporter of. Their latest efforts include partnering with Mediaocean to launch a blockchain-backed planning tool to give agencies full transparency into the full lifecycle of their spend. This allows advertisers to have an ROI based spend, fee transparency, uncover fraud, and measure ad viewability.Success to date:There was press around their consortium of partners that have signed on, including a pilot with Unilever.The promise: Kiip began as a rewarded advertising model in mobile. They evolved to a premium, moments-based ad model where brands can serve ads in moments of pause during app usage. Kiips partners are largely directly integrated app partners using SDKs and tags, and so are able to get data transparency of delivery parallel to other pixel trackers from ad servers. With this transparency, they launched a blockchain-based product called Single Ledger which records ad delivery data down to the impression on Ethereum. They also leveraged Single Ledger to manage media upfronts in the form of an ad bank that leverages tokens on Ethereum as well.Success to date:They launched a pilot campaign with AB InBev last year at Advertising Week and have been working with more than 20% of their live campaigns on leveraging Single Ledgers capabilities. They also worked with a large top 5 agency holding company to show transparency of their ad spend against a media bank balance on an Ethereum wallet effectively using the same transparency principle to show a media agency how every dollar in their upfront was being spent, recorded on-ledger.The Promise:Lucidity focuses on bringing transparency and auditability to digital advertising analytics. Specifically, they use blockchain to match signals from important members of the supply chain namely DSPs, SSPs, and verification vendors in order to authenticate campaign data like impressions and clicks. This provides advertisers with a reliable set of data to understand whats happening between parties, cut waste, and optimize their campaigns.Success to date:Lucidity was named a partner of IBMs Blockchain Accelerator program earlier this year. The company is also leading key initiatives with the IAB Tech Labs Blockchain Working Group. It was the first to releaseresultsfrom the IABs Blockchain Pilot Program, which included findings from more than a dozen brands who benefitted from having the ability to uncover high rates of impression and click discrepancies in their programmatic buys. On the heels of Luciditys highly publicized work withToyotalast year, the company is in-market with case-studies from clients across the entertainment, CPG, finance, and more. They have also released a self-serve Lucidity dashboard to a select group of agency and brand users.The promise: MadHives ad platform allows broadcast networks to sell linear advertising alongside OTT inventory, as well as providing brands with planning, targeting, measuring and optimizing tools across cross-platform linear and OTT campaigns in real-time. They leverage cryptography, blockchain, and AI to optimize business outcomes.Success to date:MadHive is currently powering linear to OTT reach extension, targeting, and fraud detection in 95%+ of the DMAs across the United States, giving local broadcasters the ability to offer addressable advertising and enabling brands to reach local markets.The promise: NYIAX is known for its NASDAQ backing, and utilizes the NASDAQ Financial Matching Engine in its technology. Their focus is on activating upfronts every day, which provides programmatic delivery of direct-to-publisher, guaranteed contracts through their advanced contract management platform. In other words, a true private marketplace, leveraging blockchain to ensure compliance across contracts and bring transparency to the supply chain. This also helps publishers understand with predictability quarterly or yearly what rates and inventory are being purchased, whilst seeing these orders minted on the blockchain.Success to date:NYIAX is running limited pilots with top publishers and top brands through their holding company relationships. In Cannes they announced an exclusive partnership with IPONWeb, providing the front-end trading platform to access the curated supply from IPONWebs newly launched MediaGrids infrastructure.The promise:Rebel Ai seeks to eliminate domain spoofing by cryptographically sealing advertisers creative with a public/private key combination. They create a unique ID for every publisher so advertisers creative only appear on the true domain. Their technology sniffs out pixels and JS scripts on websites to understand the flow of ads and to detect all middlemen in the process. This leads to their blockchain solution using the classic elements of the ledger, smart contracts, and consensus to verify if the parties in that supply chain are who you want it to be.Success to date: Rebel AI has worked with both US and EU brands, agencies, and publishers to run encrypted display and video campaigns in order to detect domain spoofing. These campaigns uncovered rates of up to 30% in the open exchange and 15% in private marketplaces.The promise: Ternio has built a highly scalable blockchain that enables brands and advertisers to independently log every unique ad impression they purchase on a chain all transacted in a programmatic environment. This gives the brand or ad agency first-hand insight into the amount paid for the ad, how many brokers were involved in the transmission, and if they are the victim of double-dipping. It also opens up the door for a real-time, instant payment tied to a smart contract.Success to date: Ternio has partnered with Amazons AWS to deploy its advertising at scale. It will be interesting to see if Amazons purchase of Sizmek allows for additional transparency for Sizmeks clients.In summary, blockchainin advertising may have limitations, but its utility is starting to become clearer and many more key players in the ecosystem are beginning to adopt and to test it. Given all the issues were facing in our industry, blockchain seems to be the most unbiased way to reconcile consumer concerns with ad delivery right now.As more companies convert to transparency and privacy-first model through the use of blockchain, well see more results and happier customers and advertisers. The 14 companies investing in the future of blockchain in advertising are undoubtedly pioneers in their own right and need all of our help in providing the support to make this technology mainstream.Donny Dvorin is the SVP of National Sales at Acuity Ads and GM of Never Stop Marketing.Read the rest of this article hereCategories All CategoriesAdvertisingApparelBrand MarketingDigital MediaEcommerceEvent ManagementMobile App DevelopmentOnline AdvertisingPackaging DesignPrintingPromotional MerchandiseSocial Media MarketingVideo MarketingWebsite Development

Like the Internet, social media, and mobile before, blockchain technologies represent a significant opportunity for enterprise marketers to reduce the cost of marketing operations, create more unique customer experiences, build improved customer relationships, and reduce corporate risk.We’ve been tracking the landscape of companies emerging to disrupt marketing with blockchain technology, and, since our first overview in September 2017, the space has expanded rapidly. At that time, there were 22 companies in the landscape. By earlier 2018, there were 88. And now, as of Q1 2019, there are 290. That’s a growth of 13x in just 18 months.Those 290 blockchain projects and companies are tackling five areas within marketing: Programmatic & Decentralized Advertising, Content Marketing, Social Marketing. Commerce, Data, and Management.There is also a set of companies that reward consumers for viewing ads or engaging with ads. Other reward-based categories include: Rewards Content Contributors, Email Rewards for reading emails, and Rewards Video Contributors. One of the most important categories as it relates to GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act is Transparent, User Rewarded Data, where consumers have visibility and ownership of their personal data.We debated whether to restrict the landscape to just “pure-play” Blockchain marketing tech startup entities or to include existing companies building solutions to leverage blockchain technology. Ultimately, it makes sense to include anyone trying to leverage the capabilities of blockchain technology with the intention of helping marketers.Tracking growth in various sectors of the blockchain marketing tech landscape provides a window into where entrepreneurs and startups believe the impact of blockchain will occur, or occur first.The landscape tells you who is out there, not necessarily who is performing. As more of these projects get into the pilot phase and beyond, we’ll be able to provide additional data around how these projects are satisfying marketer needs.Above: Click to get a closer look, or download for best view.We’re also seeing a lot of movement specifically in the AdTech sector, where many groups are looking to solve some of the numerous challenges within advertising, including transparency in the supply chain, fraud mitigation, data privacy, payments and settlements, and putting consumers first.Many are running tests now. The latest this week is from Lucidity, which discovered that just 59.8 percent percent of clicks could be confirmed as human traffic — leaving about 22,000 of 55,000 clicks unaccounted for.The IAB announced a series of pilots with MetaX, FusionSeven, Kochava/XCHNG, and Lucidity back in July, mostly to provide transparency through the programmatic media supply chain. Unilever is testing IBM’s blockchain platform to validate the agreed spend and clarify discrepancies. Additionally, at Advertising Week, Brian Wong showcased Kiip’s test with AB Inbev to verify discrepancies using a single ledger to record time-stamped impression level campaign delivery.We are also seeing significant increases in both the number of employees these entities are hiring and in total investment amounts they’ve raised, which we tabulated at $145 million in the programmatic space, based on press releases. Employee growth examples include Brave with 82 employees up from 25 12 months ago, Lucidity with 35, up from 10, and MetaX with 12, up from 9, based on conversations with each company.There is also a notable inflow of seasoned talent into the industry. Joni Leimala, former Chief Strategy Officer at GroupM is now CEO of AdCoin, and Richard Bush, previously GM of Publisher Solutions at IPONWEB, is now President at NYIAX.Informally, venture funding (as opposed to ICO funding) of blockchain-based marketing tech appears to be becoming the norm, and business models that involve blockchain but for whom tokens are merely a part of an execution strategy are increasingly prevalent. Use of technology appears to be entering a phase of build-out rather than pure speculation.Overall, the growth in the number of venture-funded companies forging ahead into the blockchain space, particularly in a down period for the “crypto” markets, is a powerful signal of an emerging consensus that there is real value to be created through the use of blockchain technologies for marketing, regardless of the success or failure of the token economy.All eyes are now looking forward, to the results from the case studies these first companies are executing. Over the next few months, those experiments will open a new chapter for marketing — one that may well vindicate these early entrepreneurs and their big bets on blockchain.Jeremy Epstein is CEO of Never Stop Marketing and author of The CMO Primer for the Blockchain World. Donny Dvorin is GM of Never Stop Marketing Research.

Shopin Welcomes Stellar New Leadership: CMO Doron Wesly and CRO Michael HermanWelcome CMO Doron Wesly and CRO Michael Herman!We are excited to take a moment and officially introduce Doron and Michael. You may have already heard their names as they’ve have been hard at work with us for the last few months, committed to bringing great success to Shopin.As chief marketing officer, Doron heads up Shopin’s marketing strategy and operations. He is responsible for scaling the brand, ensuring key markets and consumers understand the full value that blockchain and cryptocurrency bring to the retail economy. He most recently was in Miami with the team, helping grow our business and community at The North American Bitcoin Conference — and capturing our winning moment!Doron brings a wealth of marketing experience to Shopin. He came to Shopin from Lotame, where he spearheaded marketing strategies to build the brand and drive global business development efforts.He also previously served as head of market strategy at Tremor Video, head of Business Science at media agency Mindshare, global head of media investment at Samsung’s in-house agency Cheil Worldwide, and held various leadership positions at Millward Brown, IAB, Lycos, Hotbar and Applebee’s.Shopin is also proud to welcome chief revenue officer, Michael Herman. Michael is an experienced senior executive with a demonstrated history of working in the luxury fashion and tech industries.Michael joins our team from luxury women’s fashion brand Elie Tahari, where he was global president of Sales. His 20 year career includes multiple senior positions at some of the retail world’s most prestigious brands, including Donna Karan, DKNY and Valentino, where he cultivated his skills in cross-functional leadership, brand building, innovation and trend forecasting.At Shopin, Michael is responsible for overseeing retail and partner relations and brand growth strategy. He recently had the opportunity to brush elbows and chat up Shopin to some of his previous colleagues in the retail world at NRF 2018 Retail’s Big Show & EXPO.Check out more information about Shopin and our upcoming token sale here: https://tokensale.shopin.com/.And don’t forget to join our Telegram to keep up to date on our latest news: https://telegram.me/shopineverywhere.

Advertising lacks the transparency of data and process. Blockchain offers the transparency of data and process. What is the Proof-of-View and how it would help to fight fraud Analysis Advertisers and brands are increasingly losing patience with ad agencies and other players over the lack of transparency in the digital advertising space. Digital ad revenue for the first half of 2017 came in at a record $40 billion, up from $31 billion for the previous year, and it was estimated to have reached $85 billion by the end of 2017. The fight for transparency intensified in 2017 after The Times of London published a report about how the ads of big brands were appearing alongside racist videos on the giant video platform YouTube. Several brands paused their advertising temporarily, until YouTube reassured them that it had taken measures to correct the issue. The issue with YouTube speaks to the larger theme of a lack of transparency in the space. There isn’t enough information at the disposal of the advertiser regarding what they’re buying and how much they’re paying for viewed ads. Duracell, furious after finding out how much of its money goes to hidden fees compared to the actual amount it spent on ads, built its own , whereby it relates directly with a demand-side ad platform and a brand safety vendor — all in a bid to be more informed of its advertising moves. Simply put, advertisers are looking for a more transparent way to connect with their customer and audience.  Typically, the advertiser — the brand that’s looking to connect with its audience — contracts a digital ad agency to manage its entire ad campaign, with the advertiser having a set target it aims to achieve from the campaign. The advertiser pays the ad agency an amount that would cover both the overall cost of creating ad content and the cost of distributing the ad content to the brand’s target audience/customers — these two types of costs are what digital media experts call non-working and working spend respectively. One thing to note here is that an ad agency’s overhead cost is also part of the non-working spend. Once the ad agency has developed the content for the desired channels, it buys ad spaces — also called ad inventories — where the desired audiences would see the content. The ad agency has two options for buying ad spaces: buying directly from the publisher and buying programmatically through an ad exchange platform.  This usually long process fosters a lack of transparency — hidden fees, fraud, traffic, measurement and viewability — especially with programmatic media buying. For clarity, the transparency issues here can be broken into two main parts: The first part is fostered by the long nature of the programmatic ad supply chain, as shown in the image below. With each arrow in the image above, you can think of ad dollars being transferred diminishingly. And in many situations, the advertiser isn't aware of how much each player in this system takes. According to a report from the ad industry trade group IAB, 55 percent of programmatic ad revenue goes to ‘ad tech’ services, while publishers receive only 45 percent. The findings from IAB demonstrate that non-working ad spend (ad dollars that didn't get to the publisher) cost advertisers more than working spend. There are two problems here. First, advertisers don’t usually receive sufficient information about these costs. During a Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit earlier in the year, an unnamed advertising executive : The second problem is that publishers, who actually provide the platform for brands to reach their audiences, are paid less than the intermediaries. The ad fraud and viewability part of the overall transparency issues originate from publishers selling fake impressions (fake clicks and bot traffic). , whereby a publisher somehow presents his domain to be a larger publisher’s domain, is another part of the fraud problem. Ad fraud reportedly the U.S. advertising industry about $6.5 billion in 2017. Again, as in the case of hidden fees, sufficient information on how publishers verify their traffic, and the processes that ad agencies and other intermediaries follow to ensure that they work with publishers with verified traffic, needs to be available to everyone within the ecosystem. This is where blockchain comes in. Indeed, blockchain in advertising is likely to be where we’ll see the most rapid adoption. They are a match made in heaven. Advertising lacks the transparency of data and process. Blockchain offers the transparency of data and process. Here are a few practical ways that blockchain can help bring transparency to the ad buying process. Truth Agency, founded by U.K.-based The Marketing Group, is working to help alleviate the transparency issues in programmatic advertising, mainly by rapidly auditing advertising transactions. As been stated by CEO Mary Keane-Dawson: Given that the problem of transparency is systemic rather than technological, Kean-Dawson believes that taking the entirety of ad buying to the blockchain is an unnecessary and complex endeavor, and that is why Truth Agency is only looking to use blockchain to audit ad transactions. The blockchain startup looked at the ways some of the existing auditing services worked and simplified their processes by splitting it into two key parts: data collection and media contract verification.  The media contract is a ‘dumb contract’ that features the suppliers allowed within a certain campaign: Once Truth has the contract and data stored on the blockchain, it then processes each transaction from each supplier based on the rules written in the contract and publishes an audited version onto the blockchain on an hourly basis The company flags any transactions that cannot be verified through the data it has, such that both the advertiser and the team involved would be notified about the discrepancies.  Global ad software giant Mediaocean partnered with IBM in June to use blockchain to bring transparency to the “entire lifecycle of an advertiser's media dollar flow.” As the statement goes: Transparency issues on the sell-side relate to the fake traffic count, bot clicks and domain spoofing discussed earlier. Verasity — a blockchain-based, video-on-demand platform similar to Vevue — is working to improve publisher transparency with its proof-of-view (PoV) blockchain technology. PoV, which is currently pending patent, is built to securely verify and record content consumption within the Verasity ecosystem. PoV features publicly auditable logs that contain all the view counts as well as anonymized viewer information for media buyers to view, according to Verasity. The company claims that the information included in the logs are GDPR, PCI DSS and ePrivacy compliant. Verasity outlined six steps in its white paper that PoV follows to prevent fake views. TV-TWO, a player in the digital TV space, is also using blockchain to improve the advertising industry. TV-TWO has created a Smart TV app — currently being tested on Samsung and LG smart TVs — that allows consumers to watch a free, personalized video stream that is curated by a supervised learning algorithm, enabling more organic content variety and relevance. Through a campaign management tool, brands are able to book their desired advertising spots on TV-TWO using TV-TWO’s tokens. The startup employs a smart contract, which single-handedly manages all the payments within the TV-TWO ecosystem. The smart contract publishes all the transactions that takes place regarding any single ad video — from advertisers to viewers and TV-TWO — on the Ethereum blockchain without any input from the TV-TWO team. TV-TWO seeks to alleviate the scalability concerns of Ethereum blockchain by deploying off-chain signature patterns and state channel technology. TV-TWO’s supervised learning algorithm is able to serve consumers with highly relevant videos by picking up data on each consumer’s “preferences in traditional TV, in-stream behavior, surveys and other data,” co-founder Philipp Schulz said. To offer relevant ads only, the anonymized data is used for campaign targeting by advertisers. The promise of TV-TWO is to serve consumers with personalized content on TV and offer advertisers accurate, trustless information in their campaigns. TV-TWO recently advertised 20th Century’s recent blockbuster “Deadpool 2” on its platform — as part of its partnership with 20th Century Fox of Germany. Markus Schneider, 20th Century Fox’s German CFO, said the company is delighted with the results of the campaign, stressing the advantage of having direct access to their target groups on TV and paying for actual viewers only. It’s noteworthy that Schneider joined TV-TWO’s advisory board after the “Deadpool 2” campaign. Advertisers are likely to appreciate being able to potentially know the actual number of people who “saw” their ad, but it’s not certain that Verasity’s PoV and TV-TWO’s system will be 100 percent foolproof.  With Verasity, for instance, there’s no way PoV can confirm that a user — even if they meet all the criteria mentioned above — are actually watching a video, although this shouldn’t normally be a problem. After all, if a user visits YouTube to watch a video, they mostly do it for a reason, which means they’ll actually watch the video. It’s a different story with blockchain-based, video-on-demand platforms. The lure to use blockchain streaming services is to earn money by providing your data and watching advertisements.  It’s therefore possible that a user could view videos that contain ads for the sole purpose of earning some money. This means that it’s possible for a user to play a video in a way that meets all the above criteria but stay away from their streaming device to do something else while the video is playing — and still earn money. In this case, even with the publicly available and auditable information of views, advertisers might still be unable to get a genuine sense of the value they get from advertising with Verasity and any other platform with a similar model. One could argue that the tokens available for earning might not be valuable enough to encourage people to try to trick the system in this way. While that could be true, it’s still a downside worth noting. The takeaway from our conversation and research of blockchain in the media space is that blockchain can definitely play a part in moving the media space forward, especially in the advertising space. However, as innovative as blockchain is itself, it cannot, as a single technology, take away all the problems in the media space.

#1 Source For Bitcoin And Altcoin News January 25, 2018 By Mark Lyford Leave a Comment DATA project aims to resolve the massive hidden threat to the digital marketing and advertising industry; ad fraud, which costs the industry over USD$ 16 billion per year. The current anti-fraud technologies attempt to detect the fraudulent data, be it fake users or fake devices, only after the fraud has occurred, meaning data has been propagated into the entire sell-and-demand transaction ecosystem. The policing agency IAB provides the black-and-white-list of fraudulent data as a centralized list, however, these lists can become quickly out-of-date in real time, meaning it can be easily manipulated. Prof. Shoucheng Zhang, Founding Chairman of Danhua Capital, is confirmed to be Chief Advisor of DATA (DTA). Michael Arrington, Founder of TechCrunch and Paul Veradittakit, Partner of Pantera, have also joined DATA as advisors. New strategic partners include Pantera, Alphabit, Kenetic and XRP capital. DATA project is a blockchain based advertising protocol and technology stack carried by a Silicon Valley team and aims to build a Decentralised AI-powered Trust Alliance. Huobi Pro launched the DATA token $ DTA on January 17th, DTA/BTC and DTA/ETH is available for trading from 14:00, January 18 (GMT+8) DATA Project’s core competency and differentiation lay in its unique technology that can identify fraud at the device level and proactively invalidate it, therefore preventing it from leaking into the entire industry network. This is done through being powered by deep learning AI, which applies the most advanced blockchain algorithm that is secured by design, is decentralized by community consensus, and is incentivized through rewards of digital tokens to every player’s contribution toward preventing fraud. A healthy and trusted ecosystem in digital advertising guarantees that the flow of the advertising reaches the target audience whose appetite for quality content and demand for information of goods increases exponentially. By satisfying this demand from our audience, the industry’s growth can be sustained, and profits enhanced. Aside from solutions to data storage and decentralized distribution of data, and AI-based consensus to authenticate the validity of end users and devices, DATA’s core technology and open source contribution also provides the functionality to enable other applications to be created on the building blocks that can support micropayment, smart contract, reward modelling, token distribution and redemption, etc, within a secured yet flexible blockchain and tokenized economy. In the end, every player in the community or the ecosystem will become the ultimate winner through the use of DATA Project. DATA Project will refine a set of protocol standards in digital advertising, in order to be established as the industry standard. To materialize the actual implementation of DATA Project, it has partnered with Yomob International Inc., a unified mobile ad global monetization platform with a reach of 120M monthly users and 2000+ mobile developers. Yomob’s vast reach to the publisher and end-users is the cornerstone of DATA Project to ramp up its proof-of-concept stage and scale to broader adoption. Telegram: http://t.me/blockchainDATA Twitter: https://twitter.com/Blockchain_Data Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/Blockchain-Data-Foundation-1949486855317034/ Github: https://github.com/BlockchainDATA The post Anti-Ad-Fraud Alliance – DATA Proposes to Abolish Fake Users from Advertising Industry appeared first on Bitcoinist.com. Filed Under: Bitcoin Tagged With: Abolish, Advertising, Alliance, AntiAdFraud, Data, Fake, From, Industry, Proposes, Users You must be logged in to post a comment. Follow me on Steemit and earn crypto for your best comments: … [Read More...] Copyright © 2018 Digital Money Times

Enterprise blockchain – or ‘private blockchains’ – are on the rise. In fact, Deloitte’s 2018 global blockchain survey found 95% of companies across different industries were investing in blockchain tech projects. And while there is criticism across the spectrum – for and against enterprise blockchain as well as whether companies should even invest into it – almost every industry is making a concerted effort to weave it into its infrastructure. With the birth of Bitcoin, the earliest form of cryptocurrency and an example of the first practical use-case for blockchain, it comes as no surprise that the financial industry is paving the way for blockchain innovation. Given the sheer volume of transactions that take place on a daily basis, the financial market is ripe for disruption and in dire need of efficient solutions. Whether it is improving trade finance or streamlining the KYC process, blockchain can reduce extra business costs, remove intermediaries and ensure safety and security throughout. Here are a few formalised examples of enterprise blockchain adoption by major financial institutions: The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) will replace the existing Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) with a distributed ledger system by 2020. The ASX CEO claims that this system will enable customers to develop new services and reduce costs. JP Morgan Chase made several power moves in the space in what appears to be the beginnings of its own mini blockchain ecosystem. Following the launch of the JPM Coin, a digital coin for instant payments, the company is also testing a new privacy protocol, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) which will encrypt blockchain data more efficiently. It is designed for their private ETH blockchain, Quorum. IBM launched the “Blockchain World Wire” – a global blockchain payments network that allows financial institutions to use pegged cryptocurrencies as a bridge asset between any two fiat currencies, like the dollar and euro, for near real-time settlement. It is the first of its kind to integrate payment messaging, clearing and settlement on a single network. Its goal is to revolutionise the way the cross-border payments process so that underserved countries get access to money right away. This is just the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to other players investing and/or implementing enterprise solutions to streamline financial transactions. To add to the mix, Visa, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Santander, Goldman Sachs and others are developing platforms of their own. One of the most popular industries associated with the blockchain world is supply chain, or the flow of goods and services. Industry leaders like Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger, a global digital ledger that protects items of value (diamonds, for example), have long touted the ways in which the technology can revolutionise traditional supply chains. The supply chain process has many different steps, forming an assembly line of tasks that need immediate attention. The blockchain can store, record and track these processes more seamlessly, thereby speeding up the flow and cost reconciliations among different parties. This can be applied to many different subsets of supply chain and below are several examples: Supply Chain Finance: Alipay’s parent company Ant Financial announced a new supply chain finance subsidiary called Ant Shuanglian Technology (translation: ‘Ant Double Chain’) to provide financing for SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) who have large corporate customers. Ant claims that traditional supply chain finance companies would only finance 15% of suppliers. But with blockchain, 85% of suppliers can receive financing. Similar companies to do this include Ping An’s OneConnect and Tradeshift. Food Supply Chains: In collaboration with SAP, Bumble Bee Foods launched a blockchain platform to monitor the supply chain of yellow fin tuna from Indonesia to end customers, accessing origin and shipping info using a smart device.  Another organization which has implemented a similar food supply chain program is The United States National Pork Board to keep tabs on the pork supply chain process. Circular Supply Chains: Accenture is teaming up with Mastercard, cloud computing firm, Amazon Web Services, blockchain supply chain company, and Everledger, to better manage inventory, waste elimination and boost sustainability. It will allow customers to find small-scale suppliers and growers and create a rewards program for sustainable practices with direct payments. Real estate is a budding frontier for enterprise blockchain as there are major benefits in direct peer-to-peer transactions on a digital network. Traded assets can increase in value by driving out costs and eliminating middlemen, through the use of smart contracts. Blockchain can potentially ‘fractionalise’ an existing property into smaller units of ownership which are represented by ‘tokens’ or digital shares. This can create an attractive alternative funding arrangement for both buyers and sellers and ultimately improve overall liquidity for this new market. The real estate industry popularised the application of ‘tokenisation’ which means the entire value of a property is digitally represented on a blockchain network (such as Ethereum) in the form of tokens. Many companies have already jumped on this bandwagon. Below are some recent transactions: Three Swiss firms conducted a blockchain-based real estate transaction for nearly $3 million. Blockchain property transaction platform blockimmo Ltd, proptech company Elea Labs Ltd and digital assets service firm Swiss Crypto Tokens Ltd tokenised a property consisting of 18 apartments and a restaurant on the Ethereum network. It was supported by Swiss Crypto Tokens’ stablecoin and pegged to the Swiss Franc, the CryptoFranc (XCHF) to remedy price fluctuation risk. Blockchain-based real estate platform RealBlocks closed a seed funding round with Morgan Creek Digital for a decentralised platform that tokenises shares of private equity funds. It also allows real estate investors to sell shares in both domestic and international markets. Healthcare is another important industry which is constantly under fire, fuelling a never-ending political debate that has plagued the US for years. With a laundry list of fundamental issues stemming from outrageous costs to insurance fraud, we owe it to our society to offer some relief. One company that is trying to innovate and streamline the health care system is Change Healthcare, which runs a clearing house for insurance claims, processing over 30 million transactions per day. Owned by giant pharma distribution company, McKesson, Change Healthcare uses blockchain to address patient eligibility in real time by storing policy coverage information logic in a smart contract. Given the data siloes that exist between providers and insurance companies, this type of service is highly in-demand. Moving on to advertising, digital ad fraud is an enormous problem for the advertising industry, estimated to result in over $10 billion in annual losses. Blockchain solutions are emerging to create greater ad campaign transparency and combat bot-based impression fraud. Blockchain provides a single source of truth for the number of impressions delivered, eliminating disputes between marketing platforms, publishers and advertisers and improving effectiveness. Surprisingly, there are many companies tackling this problem and even payment-related problems in the industry. For example: Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), the world’s largest producer and distributor of beer is partnering with a start-up, Kiip, to write ad impression data to Ethereum in hourly batches. This will save time for media buyers and increase transparency in ad programs. A ‘micro-consortium’ among IBM, the digital advertising firm Mediaocean, and major consumer products firms Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg’s, and Unilever are leveraging a custom version of IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric, to record impression level data as well as related transactional data like purchase orders and payments. AdLedger, a new consortium that includes several industry players, including Salon Media, IPG Mediabrands, iSpot.tv, Tegna, Publicis Media, Mad Network, group m, and the International Advertising Bureau (IAB), aims to also use the Hyperledger blockchain to gain insight into ad campaign effectiveness. Many people take issue with enterprise blockchains because they are private and there is still centralisation around who can participate on the network. This is quite different from public or permission-less blockchains, like Bitcoin, which is open to the public. However, for large corporations that need to have total control of their business, this is a positive thing. It helps them keep track of transactions on the network, KYC (Know Your Customer) regulations, and achieve faster consensus, which offers more privacy, security and scalability. That said, while it is the flavour of the year, enterprise blockchain still has a long way to go before it goes mainstream. There is still a long road ahead for perfecting the use of smart contracts and the level of complexity they can currently handle. We know that blockchain technology works but there are still some kinks to work out before mass adoption comes to any single industry.

Blockchain Credit: istock Not long ago, possession meant holding something in your hand. Over the past two decades, a series of disruptors created a digital society, where the most salient feature is the ability to copy. But soon, every industry will face the blockchain disruption -- a new paradigm where ownership of digital material can be transferred without making a copy. What will this world look like? Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin provide a clue. Without blockchain technology, Bitcoins could be counterfeited as easily as copying computer code. The critical breakthrough of blockchain technology is the use of a consensus mechanism, across multiple entities, to create an immutable, distributed ledger -- a transcript where rules can be transferred, but never altered. This is how Bitcoin allows strangers to transfer electronic cash without middlemen. Bitcoin is only one application of blockchain technology. According to one study, 15% of banks and 14% of financial market institutions intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain-based services this year, and those adoption rates are expected to reach 65% within three years. Meanwhile, the FDA and IBM's Watson Health are exploring ways to use blockchain to build a patient data exchange to create an audit trail of all transactions on an unalterable distributed ledger, and in the process transform the meaning of accountability and transparency in healthcare. Ad tech impact The long-term effects of blockchain on ad tech will be a topic at today's IAB Programmatic Symposium. Can blockchain address the unintentially unwieldy and opaque supply chain in ad tech? Yes. Establishing transparency and trust requires a central and secure way to record, review and execute a deal. Today, deals are typically stored in formats and locations that are disparate and nonstandard. Initially creating standards and enabling collaboration are essential steps on this path. The blockchain transformation won't happen immediately. Nor will it eliminate middlemen entirely, as long as middlemen provide services around the new transactional trust. Agencies that help clients plan and trade strategically can thrive. Nevertheless, the blockchain revolution forces us to confront a new development. To offer one example, a song that was once housed in a CD and sold only at record stores can now be distributed a billion times over with the click of a button. This is, by now, an old story, one that can be summed up in a word: Napster. We'd do well to ask ourselves what the record industry would look like today if it had been able to answer Napster's attack with blockchain technology? One positive outcome would have been an easier way to transfer value and control to artists. On the other hand, we might not have seen as many innovations in music distribution. But it's clear that the recording industry could have averted disaster and thrived in a digital world in which the right to listen was inextricably linked to the right of ownership. The point is, every industry will face a blockchain disruption that will transform the internet and our society. Facing this challenge requires cooperation because cooperation is part of blockchain's core design. Even for simple record keeping, ad tech, like the financial sector, must move thoughtfully and cooperatively toward a new standard of trust. So let's start the conversation, because the next revolution is at our door. Most Popular

Much has been made of Google’s moves against crypto and – for a global tech giant – its relative silence on blockchain. Does Google hate crypto? Or otherwise, why does it sometimes seem that Google is hostile towards the cryptocurrencies? Let’s find out.In 2018, Google announced a ban on all cryptocurrency related ads and prohibited Chrome extensions that mine cryptocurrencies. Many took those moves as meaning that the company had ulterior motives. Pundits and venture capital investors alike weighed in:“It’s just a little bit too convenient for my taste to see a platform ban an entire ecosystem, or an entire market segment, just because they don’t want to spend the time figuring out who the bad actors are,” David Pakman, partner at the venture capital firm Venrock, told Fortune.Another investment firm CEO Phillip Nunn of Blackmore Group, speculated to The Independent: “I suspect the ban has been implemented to fit in with potential plans to introduce their own cryptocurrency to the market in the near future and therefore removing other crypto adverts allows them to do it on their own terms.”Google’s Director of Sustainable Ads Scott Spencer, for his part, insisted the move was consistent with Google’s policies, telling CNBC at the time, “We’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.”Around the same time, a tongue in cheek ad produced by Google for an unrelated product, poked fun at crypto while emphasizing the oft-repeated claim that Proof of Work driven coins like Bitcoin are environmentally unsustainable. This fueled the conspiracy theories, many of which have gained traction because it makes sense that Google – and indeed all the currently dominant Internet players – would oppose crypto. After all, crypto offers an alternative to the status quo’s data collection model, and by extension, their advertising hegemony.Proponents of this theory point to the wider tech industry trend to ban crypto. In addition to Google, Facebook, Alibaba subsidiary Taobao, and Twitter all blacklisted cryptocurrency-promoting advertisements on their platforms in 2018. Even MailChimp, a purveyor of email newsletters, announced a wide-ranging ban on crypto promoters.The established Internet giants, of course, have the most to lose from the advent of decentralized technologies and platforms – and the fact that they can unilaterally ban an entire market from advertising underlines the need for alternative structures and platforms.Google, Facebook, and now Alibaba are market monopolies for advertising, together accounting for 61.2% of the total global digital ad market, according to a September report from eMarketer, which predicts global digital ad spending to rise 17.1% to 327.28 billion USD in 2019. Advertising is by far the main source of revenue for Google, whose parent company Alphabet earns roughly 86 percent of its total revenue from advertising, according to CBNC.Advertisers are getting frustrated with increasing advertising costs / the decreasing effectiveness of ads placed on the big three platforms. Consumers, facing advertising fatigue have increasingly become immune to ads, or outright blocked them.According to an IAB report on ad blockers, 26% of respondents said they use ad blockers, with younger users more likely to browse with ad blocking extensions or software. Another digital advertising trends report by Proxima suggested that more than half of online ads aren’t seen by humans (but rather are counted as bot views), and concluded that up to 60% of digital ad marketing spend is wasted.The world’s biggest advertiser, Proctor & Gamble, meanwhile has long expressed its distaste with the status quo. In early 2017, P&G’s CEO Marc Pritchard issued an ultimatum to the digital advertising behemoths, telling them P&G doesn’t “want to waste time and money on a crappy media supply chain.”P&G followed up by cutting, according to the Wall Street Journal, 200 million USD from their digital ad spend through 2017. Pritchard explained his rationale: “We bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless ad load times, interrupt them with pop-ups and overpopulate their screens and feeds. And with ad blockers growing 40% and fraud as high as 20%, who knows if they’re even seeing our ads,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal.Of course, one of the many hyped potential applications of the crypto-blockchain tech stack is the improvement of digital advertising. According to the white paper of “global decentralized advertising exchange” Ubex, for example, the combination of blockchain, artificial intelligence and the pay per result principle could help to free the Internet from unnecessary ads, reduce the average cost of attracting customers by 50%, and eventually achieve a much higher ad conversion rate. While that’s a rather lofty talk, Brave browser, developed by former Mozilla CEO and Javascript founder Brendan Eich, has quietly amassed over 4M monthly active users according to a November press release, all browsing the web with an entirely different advertising model. The browser, according to batgrowth.com, currently has over 29,000 “verified publishers” – which include a growing list of respected publications like The Guardian and The Washington Post. Those publishers can opt-in to Brave’s “publisher-integrated ads” model, entitling them to 70% of the revenue generated by ads on their site. Of the remaining 30%, half goes to users who have opted-in to view ads (those who haven’t opted in will not see ads), while the other half goes to Brave. Brave browser sees where users spend the most time and then uses this information to calculate the payout for each publisher. This is a blockchain supported solution that seems to have the potential to provide transparency and efficiency in digital advertising – and unlike most “blockchain ideas,” Brave is actually seeing traction.With alternative models on the horizon, advertisers in search of more favorable prices may soon give preference to blockchain-based ad networks. Meanwhile, how could it be that Google and the other tech giants don’t see the writing on the wall? After all, in the past decade – from AI to augmented reality – there’s hardly been a technology that Google didn’t experiment with.President of Google parent company Alphabet, Sergey Brin, claimed that Google simply missed the boat when it comes to crypto, stating as much at a blockchain conference in Morocco in July when he said, “We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I’ll be honest,” as reported by CNBC. Brin – whose son had according to Brin mined Ethereum for “one or two” years previously – suggested that blockchain is within the wheelhouse of X, the company’s semi-secret research division.In an interview with Swiss business newspaper Handelszeitung, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project and, according to the New York Times, a top 10 most influential leader in blockchain, Brian Behlendorf, said that the established tech giants, “have a blind spot when it comes to blockchain.”In fact, according to research by CBInsights, Google was the second-most active corporate investor into blockchain companies between 2012 and 2017, falling second only to SBI Holdings (which in July launched the first bank-owned cryptocurrency exchange in Japan).Google’s involvement in blockchain was more than just hands-off investments. In 2016, Google started a trial for developers testing blockchain services on its cloud. In early 2018 there were rumors published in Bloomberg that Google was working on blockchain-related technology to support its cloud business and head off competition from emerging startups. Other rumors included that Vitalik Buterin was being pursued by Google, after the Ethereum founder briefly tweeted a live poll asking his followers if he should take an offer from Google, posting what appeared to be a screenshot of the offer. Smart contract platform Cardano was reportedly tapped for an information session with Google, a transcript of which is published on its blog. That led to rumors of a partnership between the Ethereum alternative and Google.Google finally officially entered the blockchain space only in mid-2018 when it announced on its blog that it is partnering with two blockchain startups to bring them to the Google Cloud Platform. For cloud businesses, Google wants to use the blockchain to record user transactions and improve data security and Alphabet plans to offer a license for customers to run their own versions of the blockchain on their own servers.As for blockchain-related patents, Google is not a dominant player, but its activity is far from indicating it is dismissive of the tech. Research published in Sept 2018 by iPR Daily, a Chinese media outlet specializing in intellectual property, shows that Chinese Internet giant Alibaba tops the list for blockchain-related patents, with a total of 90 patents focused on the tech. IBM comes a close second with 89 patent applications. Google, ranked at number 30 (below British Telecom), has made 22 blockchain-related patent applications.One of them, patent US20170177898A1 made in June 2018 and granted in July of the same year, aims to stamp out data tampering:“A system, method or computer readable storage medium configured for storing encrypted data on a blockchain. To write additional data in a blockchain, a request is received at a computing node.”In other words, Google wants to safeguard the integrity of data by using a blockchain system to verify any data stored on its database.When Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf said the established tech giants, “have a blind spot when it comes to blockchain,” he also predicted: “Tech giants such as Google, Amazon, or Facebook will undoubtedly pick up blockchain and generate business models from it. However, I think that the core of Blockchain — as a decentralized technology — will diminish [their] market power,” as reported by Cointelegraph.Google’s investments in blockchain companies and development of blockchain tech indicate that, as predicted by Behlendorf, the tech giant is searching for profitable business models, despite, on the face of it, appearing dismissive of the tech.Whatever profitable blockchain business models Google does come up with, it seems highly unlikely that the world’s biggest advertising platform will disrupt its own advertising monopoly. Instead, it will be up to blockchain startups like Ubex and Brave to take a big enough piece of the digital advertising pie to attract the tech giant’s attention. If and when that happens, the resulting battle may determine the future of a multi-hundred billion dollar industry and no less than the consumer-level experience of the Internet itself.Microsoft removes eight illicit crypto mining apps from storeGoogle’s BigQuery adds six new crypto and blockchain analytics toolsGoogle data scientists interested in Ethereum ClassicUAE and Saudi Arabian banks join crypto cross-border transaction projectRipple, Coinbase, and Circle make Forbes’ fintech top 50 listTencent survey: Chinese economists divided on blockchain and crypto futureYour email address will not be published. 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