Online Marketing

As a major piece in the infrastructure of the next generation WWW, Blockchain technology will bring significant changes to how companies interact with their customers online. How can applications built on blockchain technology enhance online advertising and support the interaction of businesses with their customers online?

In online advertising, the process of the routing of an advertisement from the advertiser to the user is fragmented, opaque and inefficient. The data generated in the processes is inconsistent and unevenly distributed causing distrust among participants, frequent renegotiations, and even outright fraud. Blockchains form a shared and trusted dataset that would give all parties common ground to build their services on top. Advertisers and clients would be capable of reliably evaluating the success of their campaigns and increase the return on their budgets. Aggregators on both demand and supply side as well as exchanges could streamline their processes and create more efficient and transparent marketplaces. Eventually, publishers would be able to cooperate better diminishing their reliance on aggregators and providers of analytics while micro-transactions may enable for some the return from an advertising-funded business model back to a content-centred.  

For online users, ad-blocking has increasingly become the default. Ever more sophisticated tracking mechanism and obtrusive advertising formats are signs of a dysfunctional relationship between businesses and their potential customers. Several start-ups in the blockchain space are working on solutions that help users to protect and manage the data they create online independently of an application or service. This online identity will be completely portable from one service to another strengthening the competition in an industry. Access to new customers, their attention, and data will be more challenging. If granted, the relationship will be of higher quality built on more reliable data, eventually, enabling the development of better products and services, more effective brands and relevant loyalty programs to create a more meaningful experience for the customer.