Blockchain in Media: How Blockchain Can Help Advertising

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 advertising audit system, 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.

"If we have problems with today, then it's not because of the technology powering advertising - it's because we're not sharing the information needed to stop brands [from] throwing money into a black hole. We're having these conversations about transparency over and over again, but the knowledge needed to change the situation isn't being shared."

Blockchain in advertising is likely to be where we'll see the most rapid adoption.

Advertising lacks the transparency of data and 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.

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.

TV-TWO, a player in the digital TV space, is also using blockchain to improve the advertising industry.

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.

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.